Whether it is the car tuning crowd, the overclockers or the Perl hackers, they share the same thing in common: being devoted to something.

This devotion drives a great number of innovations, and this is where Software really stands out. Particularly amongst the Open Source crowd, where Software is bound with something even more polarizing: Personality

The merging of software and personality is both a blessing and a curse. People are seldom more motivated than when working with something that feels alive; but to attack or criticize is, by definition, personal.

The people who are the most knowledgeable to defend, market, recommend (or even attack) are the ones already entrenched. They are part of the personality mesh, and as such it is exceedingly difficult to try to promote and defend a software product without going into the years of positive experiences one has shared with the product.

This article is no different. I love Catalyst and have used it for years. I will, however, attempt to back up my passion with articles of reason and rational points rather than espouse virtues that are little more than anecdotal.

To get started down this path, I think it is important to properly frame Catalyst in scope. On its own, it doesn't do much. It certainly doesn't do much well, but Catalyst by itself is really little more than a web server; it is a request handler and dispatcher and sends the response to the client.

By itself, it fails to talk to a database or handle sessions. It won't even authenticate a user. It has no template system, and no caching. So why does Catalyst have a fanatical fanbase and successful sites with it?

Quite simply, it's the CPAN.

The Catalyst philosophy is populist, not dictatorial. A belief that tools should be built to do a specific feature or function, but not require usage of any given tool; granting flexibility to a developer to solve problems the Catalyst community has not thought of how to solve.

Catalyst doesn't require you to use Template Toolkit or Mason. It doesn't push DBIx::Class as The One True ORM. It lets you pick. It trusts that you are a software developer and you are solving a problem. Catalyst just makes it easy to make your decision, and integrate that solution and start working.