Catalyst is a flexible and powerful framework for writing web-based applications in Perl. But with power and flexibility you'll always get a certain amount of complexity and on the occasions that I have looked at Catalyst for a project, the complexity has got the better of me and I've always turned to a less complex (and therefore less flexible and powerful). I knew that Catalyst was something that I should take the time to learn, but it always seemed like such a daunting task.