Book Image

Catalyst 5.8: the Perl MVC Framework

By : Antano Solar John
Book Image

Catalyst 5.8: the Perl MVC Framework

By: Antano Solar John

Overview of this book

<p>Many web applications are implemented in a way that makes developing them difficult and repetitive. Catalyst is an open source Perl-based Model-View-Controller framework that aims to solve this problem by reorganizing your web application to design and implement it in a natural, maintainable, and testable manner, making web development fun, fast, and rewarding.<br /><br />This book teaches you how to use Catalyst to weave the various components involved in a web application, using methods and tools you personally prefer along with recommendations and details on the most popularly used objects like the DBIX ORM, TT2 Template, and Moose.<br /><br />This book will take you from how the MVC pattern simplifies creating quality applications to how Catalyst allows you to tap this power instantly. It explains advanced design patterns and concludes with the improvements that Moose brings to all this. It also incorporates valuable suggestions and feedback received from the community members and our customers. By the end of the book, you will be able to build clean, scalable, and extendable web applications. This book embodies Catalyst's philosophies of Do It Yourself and Don't Repeat Yourself.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Catalyst 5.8
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
7
Hot Web Topics
Index

Adding a database


The other component that many web applications require is a SQL relational database. Technically whatever ways are available to Perl for accessing databases, Catalyst has them all. The most popular is via an Object-relational mapper (ORM) called DBIx::Class (DBIC). Object-relational mappers allow you to perform operations on your database as though each database object were a Perl object. This means that instead of writing SQL like SELECT * FROM table, you can instead say @results = $table_resultset->all. The advantage of this approach is that DBIC handles the SQL for you, so you can switch from SQLite to DB2 without modifying any of your code. The resulting code in your Controller is also more readable; everything looks like a manipulation of Perl objects and data structures. We'll see the power of this approach throughout the book, but for now, let's just create a simple DBIC Model.

You can use any database that you like for this, but I recommend SQLite for development...