Perl Dancer,Ever since I learned perl, i was dreaming to write a web app of my own. I was scared by the terms sessions, cookies, content rendering, SQL integration etc. But Dancer eased my way.

Thanks to Perl Dancer, i just deployed a Music Web App – “Spark Impulse” in our office.HIRE PERL DEVELOPERS INDIA

What is Dancer ?

Dancer is a simple but powerful web application framework in Perl. Dancer stole the approach from Sinatra, a web framework for Ruby. Yes, The bad artists imitate, The great artists steal !!

Why Dancer ?

• LightWeight
• StandAlone
• PSGI/Plack Compliant
• Expressive Syntax
• Few Dependencies
• Few Configuration Steps

Installation

Using cpanminus

spark$ curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --sudo Dancer

Using cpan shell

spark$ perl -MCPAN -e shell

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.9402)
Enter 'h' for help.

cpan[1]> install Dancer


Or even by hand

spark$ wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/X/XS/XSAWYERX/Dancer-1.3095.tar.gz
spark$ tar -zxf Dancer-1.3095.tar.gz
spark$ cd Dancer-1.3095
spark$ perl Makefile.PL
spark$ make
spark$ make test
spark$ make install


A Dancer script itself is a webserver. Yes, you read it correctly – run the script from command prompt and your web application will spring into existance.

spark$ ./myapp.pl
>> Dancer 1.3092 server 9194 listening on http://0.0.0.0:3000
>> Dancer::Plugin::Database (1.81)
>> Dancer::Plugin::Database::Handle (0.12)
== Entering the development dance floor ...

With the following code in your myapp.pl script you say a big hello to the world at http://:3000/

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Dancer;
get '/' => sub {
"Hello World !"
};
dance;

Dancer app is defined with route handlers. A route handler is basically a ‘sub’ ( function ) associated to an HTTP method and a path pattern. Valid HTTP methods are GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. But usually it will either be a GET or a POST !

Path Patterns includes Named Matching, WildCards Matching, Regex Matching, Conditional Matching as shown below. A route pattern can also contain one or more tokens (a word prefixed with ‘:’).

get '/hello/:name' => sub {
"Hi" . param('name') . ", Welcome here!";
}

When you access http://localhost:3000/hello/Peter, server should respond with a page – Hi Peter, Welcome here!

To make the token optional suffix it with a “?”

get '/hello/:name?' => sub {
"Hello there " . (param('name') || "whoever you are!");
};

You may use regex patterns for defining routes. And Dancer will return the matches in an arrayref, accessible via the keyword ‘splat’.

get '/download/*.*' => sub {
my ($file, $ext) = splat;
# do something with $file.$ext here
};

get qr{/hello/([\w]+)} => sub {
my ($name) = splat;
return "Hello $name";
}

So processing a HTTP request is equal to finding a matching route handler. When a request matches with a route handler, dancer executes that route handler.

Enough to start with !

I’m planning to add more blogs under the same topic. Till then, make some simple moves and start dancing !!

Reference: wikipedia