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

Viewing people


The first link on the index page is Look at all people. So let's create an action that will display everyone in our database, along with their addresses (if any). We'll also show links to relevant actions such as "edit name", "add address", and "delete person". The eventual goal is to have a page that looks something similar to the following screenshot:

The page is a little busy, but it conveys all the information that we want to know. (You'll also notice that Catalyst and Perl can handle Unicode data flawlessly.)

The first thing we need to do is to create a Person Controller for managing people. This Controller will have add, delete, and list actions for each person. (The list action actually shows every person, which is convenient even if the grammar isn't perfect.)

Let us generate a Controller for Person using the helpers, as follows:

perl script/addressbook_create.pl controller Person

It should look like the following (minus comments):

package AddressBook::Controller::Person...