Perl has a large number of powerful frameworks for web development, some more actively used/developed than others. As with any technology choice you should review the documentation, check out the community (mailing list, irc channel, etc.) and ask lots of questions before choosing. This page makes an attempt to help you get started in that investigation.

Popular Frameworks

Popularity should never be the sole reason for choosing a technology, however more popular projects tend to have more docs, be more actively developed and have a larger community resource to learn from. The following frameworks (as far as this author knows) are being actively used and developed, and should be on the short-list for any new Perl web development projects.

• Catalyst
• Community: http://dev.catalystframework.org/
• IRC: #catalyst on irc.perl.org
• Mailing List: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst
• Jifty
• Community: http://jifty.org/view/HomePage
• IRC: #jifty on irc.freenode.net
• Mailing List: http://lists.jifty.org/mailman/listinfo
• CGI::Application
• Community: http://cgi-app.org/
• IRC: #cgiapp on irc.perl.org
• Mailing List: http://www.erlbaum.net/mailman/listinfo/cgiapp
• WebGUI
• Community: http://www.webgui.org
• IRC: #WebGUI on irc.freenode.net
• Mailing List: http://www.webgui.org/webgui/dev/discuss

Other Frameworks

This is a list of other web frameworks out there, they are less well known, but may in fact be more what you want or need so worth at least taking a look at. Hopefully the authors of these frameworks will create linked wiki-pages so that they can tell us more about what makes their framework unique.

• Gantry
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/Gantry/
• Community: http://www.usegantry.org/
• IRC:
• Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/gantry
• Egg
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/Egg-Release/
• Maypole
• http://maypole.perl.org/
• Solstice
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/Solstice/
• ClearPress
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/ClearPress/
• CGI::Prototype
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI-Prototype/
• Konstrukt
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/Konstrukt/
• Tripletail
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/Tripletail/
• MasonX::MiniMVC
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/MasonX-MiniMVC/
• Rest::Application
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/REST-Application/
• Squatting
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/Squatting/
• Mailing List: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/squatting-framework
• Mojolicious
• http://mojolicious.org/
• IRC: #mojo on irc.perl.org
• Mailing List: http://lists.kraih.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
• Cyclone3
• http://www.cyclone3.org/
• IRC: #cyclone3 on irc.freenode.org

Older Frameworks

Being in this list is not a bad thing, older frameworks (that are still around) are stable frameworks. However, that said, they may not be as up to date on current best practices. If the things listed above are not your style, give these oldies-but-goodies a look.

• Apache::PageKit
• Mason
• While Mason has framework pieces, it can also be used as just a templating engine inside another framework such as Catalyst or Jifty.
• OpenInteract

Advice on Choosing a Framework

Most of the popular/major frameworks support multiple templating (i.e. Template Toolkit or HTML::Mason) and class (i.e. Class::DBI, DBIx::Class or Rose::DB::Object) libraries, so this usually isn't a worry.

The main things to consider would be the level of support and matching it to your requirements - there are several lightweight options such as CGI::Application or MasonX::MiniMVC, and more complex / powerful options such as Catalyst or Jifty - next it's probably wise to see how the framework fits the problem - can you make the solution fit well with an "opinionated" framework (i.e. Jifty), or do you need something more flexible (i.e. Catalyst).

There may already be an application that does what you want, without have to learn the low-level details of a particular framework.

Building a bespoke Application Server

An alternative to using a ready made framwork would be to build your own using the new components being added to CPAN for handling specific jobs like dispatching, mod_perl/FastCGI support, etc.

• HTTP::Engine "An Application server to Web Application Framework gateway. inspired from python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack."
• CPAN download
• Wiki/Trac
• HTTPx::Dispatcher
• CPAN download

Comparisons

• Benchmarking 6 frameworks (with fastcgi and no acceleration or tuning)
• Another fcgi benchmark - django vs catalyst
• Plat_Forms web development platform comparison
• MVC Marathon articles by Christopher H. Laco comparing building a web application using Catalyst, CakePHP, Django and Rails : introduction, part 1, part 2, part 3 .. more to follow

Articles

• Application Servers and Toolkits based on mod_perl - Framework summary (along with templating and other resources)
• Rapid Web Application Development with Maypole - Simon Cozens introduces Maypole
• Catalyst - Jesse Shiedlower introduces Catalyst (with an explanation for its fork from Maypole)
• Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application - Mark Stosberg gives a CGI::App update (with a brief comparison to Catalyst)
• Catalyst Compared - A comparison table between CGI::App and Catalyst
• Hey, That's Pretty Jifty, er, Nifty - Curtis Poe reviews Jifty (with a brief comparison to Catalyst)
• A Holiday Gantry Web Application - Phil Crow demonstrates Gantry (with Bigtop and Tentmaker)
• The MVC Colouring Book - Kirrily Roberts introduces MiniMVC

See Also

• Planet MVC Blog aggregator
• Templates
• ORM
• Web Application Dispatchers
• Form Processing
• HTML Sanitazing