---
title: An astonishing percentage of what I've been up to for the last six months
date: 2005-12-25 17:50:00.000000000 -08:00
type: post
parent_id: '0'
published: true
password: ''
status: publish
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tags:
- jifty
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  lj_itemid: '288'
  lj_permalink: http://obra.livejournal.com/73730.html
author:
permalink: "/2005/12/25/an-astonishing-percentage-of-what-ive-been-up-to-for-the-last-six-months/"
---
<p>It gives me great pleasure to announce the first release of Jifty, a<br />
new web application framework in Perl.&nbsp; Jifty is designed to help you<br />
write clean, maintainable applications quickly and easily. Actually,<br />
it was designed to help _us_ write clean, maintainable applications<br />
quickly and easily. We very much hope that you'll find it as great to<br />
work with as we do.</p>
<p>As we built Jifty, we talked to many, many folks about what they wanted in<br />
a web framework. They told us that they didn't want to mess with database<br />
schema.&nbsp; They wanted AJAX to "just work." They wanted their code to be<br />
clean and simple.&nbsp; They wanted the power of CPAN. They wanted infinite<br />
choices about the way their apps were built. They wanted "one good way"<br />
to make applications built into the framework.&nbsp; From what we could tell,<br />
they were basically all saying the same thing: "I want a pony."</p>
<p>In addition to being a pleasure to work with, Jifty is a<br />
veritable treasure trove of buzzwords.&nbsp; At its core is Jifty::DBI,<br />
an object-relational mapping system with a clean, declarative<br />
syntax. Jifty::DBI is based on DBIx::SearchBuilder, which has powered<br />
uncountable thousands of RT instances for the better part of a decade<br />
but adds a few new twists. Jifty::DBI handles _all_ your SQL. No INSERTs,<br />
no DELETES, no SELECTs, no CREATE TABLEs and no ALTER TABLEs. Jifty will<br />
set up your database schema when you first deploy your application and<br />
upgrade it as you update your model classes.</p>
<p>Jifty's core web framework follows the Model-View-Controller pattern<br />
-- with a twist. Rather than the standard URL-based controller, Jifty<br />
uses a new argument-name-based dispatcher that makes Web Services and<br />
AJAX/AHAH easy.</p>
<p>As one might expect, these days, Jifty comes with built in AJAX support,<br />
based on Prototype.js and Script.aculo.us.&nbsp; It only takes a few seconds<br />
to set your pages up with rich dynamic interaction...that seamlessly<br />
degrades in non-AJAX browsers.</p>
<p>Jifty's application-level continuations make it a breeze to let a user<br />
pop off to a login page or a wizard and get back to where they came from,<br />
complete with the results of the their excursion.</p>
<p>Out of the box, every new Jifty application comes with a built in<br />
documentation browser, database administration interface. And a pony.</p>
<p>Find out more about Jifty at <a href="http://jifty.org">http://jifty.org</a>.&nbsp; Download a copy from<br />
CPAN today. Join us on #jifty on irc.freenode.net.</p>