Howdy All,
Those of you that watch CPAN will have noted that Perl Catalyst 5.90090 has landed! This actually happened a few days ago but I wanted to watch CPAN testers to make sure distribution was stable before telling you all to got ahead and download. it.
This version of Catalyst should continue our tradition of solid backwards compatibility and in general if you code runs on any modern catalyst in the last year or two I would expect no trouble upgrading. Older versions of Catalyst applications should review the Upgraded and changelog carefully for hints but again I would think any version of Catalyst 5.8xxxxx+ should work fine, although you might need to set a few configuration flags.
The biggest new features is Arg and CaptureArg type constraints. This allows you to specify a Moose or Type::Tiny type constraint (or list of constraints) in your action attributes:
sub myaction :Local Args('Int') { ... }
Please see the new Routing documentation in the distribution for more.
We also took the opportunity to move some previously available via plugins extensibility features to core. You can now 'injection' Catalyst components into your application via configuration, which should save some boilerplate classes. Also we added into core the ability to declare roles for request, response and statistics classes. This allows you to more easily modify and add global features to these respective classes.
For now see the primary documentation for more.
