2008-12-24: Web Application Frameworks

Ido Kanner writes in his blog (in Hebrew) about web-application framework. I am replying here, because his blog does not provide a Preview plugin for comments (due to limitations of wordpress.com). Aside from the alternatives he mentioned for Perl, I am aware of the following:

  1. CGI::Application - very basic functionality, but also very flexible.
  2. CGI-Application-Plus - backwards compatible with CGI-Application, with some improvements.
  3. CGI-Builder - inspired by CGI-Application, but not backwards compatible. (by the same author as CGI-Application-Plus).
  4. CGI-Prototype - another lightweight framework based on prototype-based OO (like Self, JavaScript, Io, etc.)
  5. Catalyst - a web framework that supports many different view/model backends and has many plugins on CPAN. Seems to be the most popular.
  6. Jifty - should be more RoR'ish than Catalyst, and also have a concept of continuations. Only supports HTML::Mason and Jifty::DBI.
  7. Gantry - don't know a lot about it.
  8. AxKit - Perl and XML-based for Apache
  9. WebGUI - a Perl-based framework mixed with a content management system. (I had problems getting it up and running on my Mandriva Cooker system, after installing it from source, and it also made my Apache instances consume much more memory, so I disabled it.)
  10. Mojolicious - started as a fork of Catalyst. Don't know too much about it, but you can find more from the site.

I also had some experience with the PHP-based Symfony (review in the link).

Ido also mentions some JavaScript based "frameworks" like jQuery, or Mootools, but naturally they are not an alternative to server-side frameworks, but rather complementary.

Moreover, sometimes Content-Management-Systems can be used in a similar fashion to web-development frameworks, and there are many of those too.