Basic concepts of Jifty

• to build some website with Jifty, you need to construct an application. An application is something like a "world" in which your templates plus all the logic behind live. Every application is independent of all other applications.
• every application has a configuration file named etc/config.yml. This config file is controlling the overall behaviour of your application.
• for every application you may use a different server that drives the application's pages.
• an application has a database schema that minimally consists of some session-specific tables. The schema consists of tables, that are constructed (or updated) automatically based on model-specified requirements.
• the logic behind your application is encapsulated in action classes. An action includes form definitions, form handling, error-checking and much more.
• if you intend to use a database to store data, you define models. Every model defines data structures and other database related things that will automatically get updated into the database schema.
• based on models, actions and an optional dispatcher the behaviour of your application is defined. The behavior may vary from page to page and even depend on the current user.
• Jifty uses HTML::Mason as the templating engine to render its templates. A comprehensive Manual about all Mason commands can be found at http://www.masonhq.com/docs/manual.