Many web applications are implemented in a way that makes developing them painful and repetitive. Catalyst, an MVC framework for Perl, lets you design and implement a web application in a natural, maintainable, and testable manner. Everything that your web application needs to do is only written once; you connect to the database in one place, have configuration in one place, etc. Then, you just write actions for each URL that your application needs, without worrying about the database connections or HTML to produce. Catalyst will handle the details so you can worry about writing your application. Thanks to Catalyst's plug-in system, it can do more than just dispatch requests—it can manage sessions and users for you, as well as handle many other common tasks. Catalyst is designed to be reliable. There are hundreds of production applications and thousands of users. The code is well-tested and new releases almost always maintain compatibility with applications written for older versions. You don't have to worry about Catalyst breaking your application and slowing down your development. It just works.

Most importantly, Catalyst (and Perl) has a thriving community. You can ask a question on the IRC channel and get a response at almost any time of the day. There are also resources on the web for learning more; blogs from developers and users, recipes on the advent calendar and a wealth of questions answered on the mailing list.