I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively large number of comments to my first MVC post. Either people are very interested in MVC in general, and have things to say about it, or there's some reverse psychology going on in starting a post with "don't mind me".

Just in case it's the latter... don't mind me this time either. In fact, if anything, I seem to have gotten even more ignorant and directionless since last time. MVC frameworks are hard, let's go shopping!

Reviewing Catalyst. I found this screencast a couple of weeks ago. Here are my impressions while watching it:

• It's nice to have a skeleton of the application generated for you. Can be taken to extremes, of course, but the general idea is sound.
• Compared to the Rails screencast, this one cheats a bit on details. It skips parts of the installation process. It says "there's really no excuse not to document your code any more" but then doesn't fill in the blanks.
• It also (unconsciously) presupposes a lot of prior knowledge. Example: "The index method does the actual handling of requests for the root path. It has two attributes: :Path and :Args. We specify that it handles all paths (because there is nothign like '/foo' after :Path), and it takes no arguments off of the stash." I see. What's the stash?
• The debug screen is nice. It makes good use of the terminal.
• Suddenly, the screencast is over. It refers to a Part 2, but there's no Part 2 yet.
• Overall impression: Catalyst is an application that lets me dispatch on URLs. I'm sure there must be more to it than that.

I also stepped through the slides about chained, since I've gotten good vibes about those, but don't really grok them yet. I'll have to come back to it, because I didn't understand everything in it yet.

After both of these, I still feel very much in the dark about what makes Catalyst great. I almost feel as if I'm starting at the wrong end. I had a chat with the good people over at #catalyst, and they advised me to buy the book, which I did. Hopefully it will quench my thirst for knowledge.

Next up: Django.