Love web development? Love Perl and it’s Dancer2 web framework? You love Perl web development! Just like me! Perl is my weapon of choice for all kinds of web related projects.
Don’t know how to start a web project in Perl? Look no further, at the end of this series I have given a look in my development kitchen. This should give you the tools for a good start.
Perl web development
Web development in Perl has come a long way from ‘just’ being the glue for the web to being a reliable platform for all kinds of web apps. I’ve built small websites, large websites, app backends, SOAP services and a lot more with Perl.
Web frameworks
Nowadays Perl has a number web frameworks to choose from, the most popular amongst them are:
- Catalyst
- Mojolicious
- Dancer2
- WebGUI (Full featured CMS)
I’ve used WebGUI a lot in the past, but now I almost exclusively use Dancer2 as web framework due to their DSL. The DSL is big enough to do everything I need in perl web development yet small enough to keep it very lightweight.
App infrastructure
In the past couple of years I tried a number of different setups for my app infrastructure. Some more successful than the other. It’s not easy to find examples of how other people are doing it on the web and certainly not methods that I haven’t tried before. But I think I’ve finally found something solid that I can work with for years. And next to that, I think this setup is easy and segmented enough for other developers to quickly learn how the app is build and where to look for functions, routes, etc.
Dev tools
Just like I tried a number of setups for the infrastructure, I’ve tried numerous development tools before I found the ones that I really like and need. As a result my tool shed currently exists of Perlbrew, Git, Carton, Sqitch, DBIx::Class, Starman, Nginx, Dancer2 and a bunch of Dancer2 plugins.
Sample app
One of the better ways for me to learn something new in the development field is just build something. Therefore I’ll write a couple of articles in which you can follow along writing a web app to make a catalog of a DVD collection. The outline looks something like this but is likely to change as I’m writing them.
- Git
- Perlbrew
- Carton
- Sqitch
- Dancer2
The rest of the steps have to be determined while I’m writing them. I hope you will find them useful. In conclusion we’ll have a working app that you build yourself using nothing other than Perl web development.
** Update 06-11-2016 **
The first article in the series has just been published. You can find the article about git here