Introducing the Catalyst Web Application Framework

Abstract

Web application frameworks are collections of software libraries that aim to provide the programming facilities required for the creation of dynamic websites. In the early days of the Web, pretty much all websites were statically published pages of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Fairly early on in the history of the Web, people wanted to be able to publish dynamic information, for example, with a database store. This led to the development of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts. The first CGI scripts were written in shell or C which, due to the text-centric nature of the Web, was not terribly convenient. Perl, being a language designed for data interchange and text processing, was a strong contender for CGI scripting from the early days and rapidly became popular. The CGI.pm module became part of the Perl core on the release of Perl version 5.004 in 1997.