Programming the web with Dancer

Dancer is a lightweight featureful beautiful web framework in Perl. The class covers how Dancer works, how to use it effectively, and various tricks and hints for a successful and productive usage of it in production environment, whether it is in a major company, a start up, or your personal website.

Class outline

• Brief history of Dancer
• Dancer application structure
  • Creating
  • Configuring
  • Internal layout
  • File structure layout
• Dancer2 syntax
  • Methods
  • Routing spec
  • Parameters and variables
  • Control flow
  • Cookies and sessions
  • Hooks
• PSGI/Plack and Deployment of Dancer applications
• Best practices
• Tips and tricks
• Bonus content (time permitting)
  • Writing tests
  • Middlewares

Intended audience

Perl beginner programmers, web beginners, and web intermediates

Familiarity with Perl and at least a brief understanding of web programming is required.

Required materials

Each student must bring:

• Laptop - mandatory
• Perl + Editor - mandatory
• Preinstalled modules: Dancer2 >=0.202, Starman, Test::More >= 0.98,
• Test::WWW::Mechanize::PSGI, KiokuDB, KiokuDB::Backend::Files - all mandatory
• cURL (if Linux/Mac) - optional

Please make sure to have the items installed ahead of time so we don't not take time of the course to installing them.

Speaker Biography

Sawyer X has been a core developer of Dancer probably too quickly after it came into the world. He has led Dancer and now leads the new branch of Dancer: Dancer2. He's the current project leader and main developer.

Mickey is a core developer in Dancer2 and has provided some of the bigger changes including major overhauls of core components, along with massive cleanups of the inner workings of Dancer.

Both Sawyer and Mickey currently work on Dancer (amongst other projects) at Booking.com.