The Catalyst API

Now, after the Moose port is completed, it looks like a good time for reviewing the Catalyst API. It's not a secret that in my opinion some of the Catalyst practice is a cargo cult (for example using forward instead of a subroutine call), other parts could be greatly simplified. In How I Use Catalyst the interesting part is how Dave also does not use some important parts of the Catalyst API, and Marcus in his reply, even though he disagrees with Dave, still he does agree that there might be a more suitable API for some things.

It's time to review the API, check how Moose can improve it, remove the redundancies and make it slim.

One more piece of food for thought: the thing that always bothered me is the first parameter every action receives:

	sub index :Path :Args(0) {
	my ($self, $c) = @_;

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I've never seen it used. I even was never sure if that thing is a controller object or if it is the controller class (i.e. if the actions are class or object methods), is it ever explained in the docs? Now I tested it and the output was:

	$VAR1 = bless( {
	'_application' => 'DVDzbr',
	'namespace' => '',
	'action_namespace' => '',
	'_controller_actions' => {}
	}, 'DVDzbr::Controller::Root' );

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so at least that action was an object method. I've reviewed the whole Catalyst Tutorial and, even though this parameter is passed to every action example there it is used in only a couple places (as $self->action_for('list') and $self->roles). This does not seem like the best Huffman coding.