Dancer vs Catalyst [Perl Web Frameworks] [closed]

Question

What do you think about both? I began reading a book about Catalyst, and found it pretty complex as compared to Dancer. so now I'm giving Dancer a try, and it looks easier to learn and more "human friendly".

Answer 1

I think David's comment is very accurate and excellent. However, as someone who has done development in both but is not a developer on either perhaps I can be slightly more objective (and technical) in what the differences are.

Both frameworks provide a variation on the Web MVC paradigm.

Catalyst's main level of abstraction is the Controller. Catalyst expects you to break separate logic out into separate packages in some logical fashion (Login code goes here, Registration code goes there, Search functionality over here). This works incredibly well if you have a team of programmers since each of you can work on separate files and not step all over each other during merges. Catalyst provides a lot of tools for making the Controller logic extensible and flexible, I think the premier example of this is Chained actions which let you split up and build a complex flow for any given request. The downside is that it becomes very seductive to put your business logic into the Controllers and you end up with very fat logic in the Controllers where it (theoretically) belongs in the Model.

Dancer's main level of abstraction is the Route. My experience with Dancer is this leads to much smaller applications. Partly my experience here is tinged with the fact that I have dealt with several thousand line applications in Catalyst but I have yet to write a Dancer app that is longer than 200 lines (with a much smaller scope). I think however that this experience holds true. The push in Dancer is in keeping the Controller logic very thin because it doesn't have the same tools for managing complex behaviors there that Catalyst does.

Honestly I've enjoyed working in both of them. They both provide different opinions on what writing a web application is supposed to be. I would, given the time and inclination, recommend learning both ultimately.

Answer 2

This is a somewhat subjective question, but I'll try to give you an answer in an objective way. First things first, a disclaimer: I'm part of the Dancer development team, so my opinion should of course be considered somewhat biased :)

Catalyst is more widely used than Dancer, and so there's more community support behind it - if you were to look for contractors with experience working with either framework, say, you'd be more likely to find developers who've used Catalyst. So, if you're looking for commercial support, that would be a good reason to choose Catalyst.

Dancer is a younger project, and targeted more towards smaller projects, making getting up and running quick and easy, and trying to stay out of your way. That's not to say that Dancer isn't suitable for larger projects, however; the same habit of staying out of your way means you can organise your project in the way that suits you.

However, it has picked up a lot of support, and there's a growing community of helpful users and developers on IRC and the mailing list, and more and more useful plugins being released all the time. As with Catalyst, Dancer is designed so that you can pick and choose your preferred template engine, session storage backend etc, and it's easy to extend the framework by writing your own plugins if you need to.

For user testimonials to see what people say about Dancer, see the section at the bottom of the homepage on the new website: http://www.perldancer.org/

In the interests of showing other options, there's also Mojolicious, another modern Perl web framework which has been gaining in popularity lately.