For quite a while I have been playing with Web Frameworks in the hope that I would find a more “Large Scale” method of writing Web Applications.

Since being hooked on Python at the time I started with Zope, reading the programmers guide from front to back I ended up believing that Zope was indeed a great Framework, It made sense why it was rebuilt from scratch, but I was no closer to being able to use it.
Then came Django and TurboGears. Once again I skimmed the manuals and even gave Django an install but they still felt alien to me and incomplete (Maybe things have changed now – that was over a year ago:)).

So I lay down my Python tools and picked up my Java book, after all Java 6 was much faster now and many Java based Web Frameworks were out there and driving some of the largest sites in the world. My only problem now was choice.
Choosing a decent Framework using Java is tough – not only do you need to choose the Framework you need to choose a container to host your application. Do you use JBoss,Geronimo (My Fave), GlassFish or any of the other App Servers out there? and do they support your chosen OS? Java was written by Sun and always runs faster on Solaris – but I use FreeBSD – something that Sun don’t even offer a download of the JDK for!. In the end I got Geronimo working fine on FreeBSD – but it still did not feel right.

That’s when I found Catalyst

Described as an Elegant MVC Framework, Catalyst felt right, looked right and worked perfectly on FreeBSD.
Written in Perl and designed for Perl developers my enthusiasm for Perl 6 drove me to give it a whirl and am I glad I did!
The documentation is excellent, the built in debugging actually assists the developer and the Framework is so flexible you can write your App pretty much any way you like.

I plan to use the Catalyst Framework for the notification application Wave2 Infomeer and will let you know how things work out, but in the meantime if like me you have tried several Web Frameworks and never felt comfortable I’d suggest you give Catalyst an hour of your time – you’ll be impressed!.

Well as you can see I finally got around to building a new server (FreeBSD of course:)).

Work is still underway to get everything back up and running, but at this rate it should only be another week or so before I can stop working on web services and get back to writing code!.

Technology wise not much has changed. I will be adding a new Forum based on bbPress which may or may not come in handy, I also switched from Viewvc over to SVN::Web which is cool!.

All tools have been bumped to the latest versions with a Bugzilla rebuild on the horizon as soon as they hit 3.0 (Anytime now).

I might even get chance to work on an Asterisk Widget I have planned for so long….:)