Massively Parallel Procrastination

An astonishing percentage of what I've been up to for the last six months

It gives me great pleasure to announce the first release of Jifty, a
new web application framework in Perl.  Jifty is designed to help you
write clean, maintainable applications quickly and easily. Actually,
it was designed to help _us_ write clean, maintainable applications
quickly and easily. We very much hope that you'll find it as great to
work with as we do.

As we built Jifty, we talked to many, many folks about what they wanted in
a web framework. They told us that they didn't want to mess with database
schema.  They wanted AJAX to "just work." They wanted their code to be
clean and simple.  They wanted the power of CPAN. They wanted infinite
choices about the way their apps were built. They wanted "one good way"
to make applications built into the framework.  From what we could tell,
they were basically all saying the same thing: "I want a pony."

In addition to being a pleasure to work with, Jifty is a
veritable treasure trove of buzzwords.  At its core is Jifty::DBI,
an object-relational mapping system with a clean, declarative
syntax. Jifty::DBI is based on DBIx::SearchBuilder, which has powered
uncountable thousands of RT instances for the better part of a decade
but adds a few new twists. Jifty::DBI handles _all_ your SQL. No INSERTs,
no DELETES, no SELECTs, no CREATE TABLEs and no ALTER TABLEs. Jifty will
set up your database schema when you first deploy your application and
upgrade it as you update your model classes.

Jifty's core web framework follows the Model-View-Controller pattern
-- with a twist. Rather than the standard URL-based controller, Jifty
uses a new argument-name-based dispatcher that makes Web Services and
AJAX/AHAH easy.

As one might expect, these days, Jifty comes with built in AJAX support,
based on Prototype.js and Script.aculo.us.  It only takes a few seconds
to set your pages up with rich dynamic interaction...that seamlessly
degrades in non-AJAX browsers.

Jifty's application-level continuations make it a breeze to let a user
pop off to a login page or a wizard and get back to where they came from,
complete with the results of the their excursion.

Out of the box, every new Jifty application comes with a built in
documentation browser, database administration interface. And a pony.

Find out more about Jifty at http://jifty.org.  Download a copy from
CPAN today. Join us on #jifty on irc.freenode.net.