What makes Catalyst special? It's the way we develop it. Take a look.

We tend to keep things small and simple. This gives us robustness and scalability - your Catalyst-based app also inherits those. No complicated object hierarchies - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Why reinvent the wheel? When you write your app with Catalyst, you don't have to care much about session handling or authorization. You just use it. CPAN has a vast amount of power, which we bring to you. Don't Repeat Yourself.

If you don't like something in default setup, why not replace it? There Is More Than One Way To Do It. You can choose from a wealth of available models and views, drop in a bunch of plugins and create the setup that fits you best. Data storage? Would you like to use DBIx::Class? Class::DBI::Sweet? Or perhaps you already have a Class::DBI schema? How about presenting the data? Template Toolkit or Mason? HTML::Template, perhaps? And in case you want PNG or PDF output, you'll need just a few lines...

With available plugins, you can extend the functionality of Catalyst. If you want sessions, form validation or authentication, you can have any or all of them. Catalyst comes with its own lightweight test server for development. It will even restart itself when it detects your sources have changed, so you see results instantly!

Source: Catalyst

Interchange is a free and open source e-commerce web application server and platform written in Perl. Its primary use is building customized e-commerce and catalog solutions.

It is a descendant of Vend, an e-commerce system originally developed by Andrew Wilcox in early 1995. Mike Heins took the first publicly-released version, Vend 0.2, and added searching and DBM catalog storage to create MiniVend. Mike released MiniVend 0.2m7 on December 28, 1995. In 2000, ecommerce startup Akopia acquired Mike's consultancy, Internet Robotics, hired him, and merged its product, Tallyman, with MiniVend, to create Interchange. (Tallyman was a GPL'd web framework written in Perl and Embperl, backed by Oracle or PostgreSQL.)

In 2001, Akopia was acquired by Red Hat. Within a few years, Red Hat had tightened its focus on Enterprise Linux and ended its involvement with Interchange, which is now maintained by its community of developers, including ex-Akopia employees, most of whom still make a living doing Interchange development.

Source: Wikipedia

Mason is a powerful Perl-based web site development and delivery engine. With Mason you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages from shared, reusable components.

Mason solves the common problems of site development: caching, debugging, templating, maintaining development and production sites, and more.

Mason is 100% free and open source. Although it can be used from CGI or even stand-alone, it is optimally designed for use with two other open source technologies: mod_perl and Apache.

Source: Mason

CGI::Application builds on standard, non-proprietary technologies and techniques, such as the Common Gateway Interface and Lincoln D. Stein's excellent CGI.pm module. CGI::Application judiciously avoids employing technologies and techniques which would bind a developer to any one set of tools, operating system or web server.

The guiding philosophy behind CGI::Application is that a web-based application can be organized into a specific set of "Run Modes." Each Run Mode is roughly analogous to a single screen (a form, some output, etc). All the Run Modes are managed by a single "Application Module" which is a Perl module. In your web server's document space there is an "Instance Script" which is called by the web server as a CGI (or an Apache::Registry script if you're using Apache + mod_perl).

CGI::Application is an Object-Oriented Perl module which implements an Abstract Class. It is not intended that this package be instantiated directly. Instead, it is intended that your Application Module will be implemented as a Sub-Class of CGI::Application.

Source: CGI::Application

Jifty is a way to build web applications.

What's cool about Jifty?

• DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
• Full-stack
• Continuations
• Form-based dispatch
• Perl
• CPAN

Source: Jifty

Gantry is a mature web framework, released in late 2005 onto an unsuspecting world.

Gantry Features

• Code generation with Bigtop
• Stand-alone server for rapid development
• Runs on anything that runs Perl
• Plugin architecture
• Runs under mod_perl, Fast-CGI, CGI
• Flexible template system
• User authentication and sessions
• Built-in CRUD operations
• Form generation and validation
• DBIx::Class support
• Database and SQL utilities

Source: Mason

Dancer is a web application framework designed to be as effortless as possible for the developer, taking care of the boring bits as easily as possible, yet staying out of your way and letting you get on with writing your code.

Dancer aims to provide the simplest way for writing web applications, and offers the flexibility to scale between a very simple lightweight web service consisting of a few lines of code in a single file, all the way up to a more complex fully-fledged web application with session support, templates for views and layouts, etc.

If you don't want to write CGI scripts by hand, and find Catalyst too big or cumbersome for your project, Dancer is what you need.

Dancer has few pre-requisites, so your Dancer webapps will be easy to deploy. Dancer apps can be used with a an embedded web server (great for easy testing), and can run under PSGI/Plack for easy deployment in a variety of webserver environments.

Source: Perldancer

A next generation web framework for the Perl programming language.

Back in the early days of the web there was this wonderful Perl library called CGI.pm, many people only learned Perl because of it. It was simple enough to get started without knowing much about the language and powerful enough to keep you going, learning by doing was much fun. While most of the techniques used are outdated now, the idea behind it is not. Mojolicious is a new attempt at implementing this idea using state of the art technology.

Features

• An amazing MVC web framework supporting a simplified single file mode through Mojolicious::Lite.
• Very clean and Object Oriented pure Perl API without any hidden magic and no requirements besides Perl 5.8.1.
• Full stack HTTP 1.1 and WebSocket client/server implementation with IPv6, TLS, IDNA, pipelining, chunking and multipart support.
• Builtin async IO and prefork web server supporting epoll, kqueue, hot deployment and UNIX domain socket sharing, perfect for embedding.
• CGI, FastCGI and PSGI support.
• Fresh code, based upon years of experience developing Catalyst.
• Powerful out of the box with RESTful routes, plugins, sessions, signed cookies, static file server, testing framework, Perl-ish templates, JSON, I18N, first class Unicode support and much more for you to discover!

The Mojolicious web framework is all about minimalism and simplicity. True to its Perlish roots making simple things easy and hard things possible. A project can be started as a single file web application using Mojolicious::Lite and later grow to a well structured Mojolicious application.

Source: Mojolicious