Difference between Catalyst and Mason

Question

I wanted to know how do Catalyst and Mason differ. Do they both do similar things? I have heard that amazon uses Mason for their websites. Can catalyst be used in similar manner?

Answer 1

Mason allows you to embed small bits of perl into your HTML documents. It also provides a rich system of components complete with notions of inheritance. Because it mixes Perl and HTML, it is easy to abuse Mason and tie interface code closely with application logic. Mason is a very capable library, but it is not a web framework. It occupies a middle ground between application framework and templating library. There is a book about using Mason available online.

Catalyst is a popular web application framework. In other words, it provides infrastructure for interacting with the server, dealing with users, authentication, and data access. The standard template library used with Catalyst is TemplateToolkit. However it is possible to use Mason as your template system with Catalyst.

You can use these two libraries together or separately.