Catalyst
I’ve been playing with the Catalyst Web Framework lately, and I’m quite impressed. The Model-View-Controller concept is great, and it is the sort of thing that I’ve been waiting on to make web development reasonable. Writing web applications has always felt very hacky to me, but MVC improves it a lot. I spent a week or two looking into Ruby on Rails, as it seems to be the flavour of the week, but when I found Catalyst, I knew that was the way for me to go. It basically comes down to the fact that I already know Perl extremely well, and don’t know any Ruby at all. The Catalyst community is smaller and the documentation is more sparse, but I was able to hit the ground running because of my Perl experience. So far, my only hangups have been with the Template Toolkit, which I had not worked with before and that has several idiosyncrasies.
It all almost makes web development fun again. Who knew?