Catalyst::Manual::Internals - Catalyst Internals
This document provides a brief overview of the internals of Catalyst. As Catalyst is still developing rapidly, details may become out of date: please treat this as a guide, and look at the source for the last word.
The coverage is split into initialization and request lifecycle.
Catalyst initializes itself in two stages:
__PACKAGE__->setup is called,
it evaluates any options stored (-Debug,
-Engine=XXX),
and makes the application inherit from Catalyst (if that hasn't already been done with an explicit use base 'Catalyst'; or extends 'Catalyst';.
Any specified plugins are then loaded,
the application module is made to inherit from the plugin classes.
It also sets up a default log object and ensures that the application module inherits from Catalyst and from the selected specialized Engine module.$class::Controller,
$class::C,
$class::Model,
$class::M,
$class::View and $class::V namespaces (using Module::Pluggable).
As each is loaded,
if it has a Catalyst::Component/COMPONENT method then this method will be called,
and passed that component's configuration.
It then returns an instance of the component,
which becomes the $self when methods in that component are called later.register_actions method called.
At this point,
the subroutine attributes are retrieved from the MooseX::MethodAttributes::Role::Meta::Map,
parsed,
and used to build instances of Catalyst::Action,
which are then registered with the dispatcher.For each request Catalyst builds a context object, which includes information about the request, and then searches the action table for matching actions.
The handling of a request can be divided into three stages: preparation of the context, processing of the request, and finalization of the response. These are the steps of a Catalyst request in detail; every step can be overloaded to extend Catalyst.
handle_request
prepare
prepare_request
prepare_connection
prepare_query_parameters
prepare_headers
prepare_cookies
prepare_path
prepare_body (unless parse_on_demand)
prepare_body_parameters
prepare_parameters
prepare_uploads
prepare_action
dispatch
finalize
finalize_uploads
finalize_error (if one happened)
finalize_headers
finalize_cookies
finalize_body
These steps are normally overloaded from engine classes, and may also be extended by plugins. For more on extending Catalyst, see Catalyst::Manual::ExtendingCatalyst.
The specialized engine classes populate the Catalyst request object with information from the underlying layer (Apache::Request or CGI::Simple) during the prepare phase, then push the generated response information down to the underlying layer during the finalize phase.
Catalyst Contributors, see Catalyst.pm
This library is free software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
