PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

Far gone are the days when you wrote Perl for the web in just CGI. Dancer, Catalyst and Mojolicious are the modern ways of going about it, with Mojo's version 8.0, code-named "Supervillain", being released just last week. Each framework has its own distinct advantages, with Dancer being considered the most lightweight and with the lowest entry barrier; and Catalyst being considered the most heavyweight and with a steep learning curve. Mojo floats somewhere in the middle, its own strongest point being its claim to be a  "Real time Web framework"  due to its Websockets and non-blocking/async capabilities provided out of the box. With that said, let's discover what Mojo's newest version has to offer. The most outstanding feature, given that Mojo is based on an Event loop à la NodeJS, is the introduction of the  "Mojo::Promise"  module, a Perl implementation of Promises that simplifies and enhances the asynchronous operations callback mechan...

Of course Gabor needs no introduction, but it's worth mentioning that his is a later attempt of publishing a book on the Dancer framework in general. The first one, which I covered in  Help Kickstart First Ever PerlDancer Book , was initiated by the Dancer's core devs themselves who unfortunately couldn't generate enough traction therefore the fund raising campaign failed. Fortunately this second campaign by Gabor proved successful to the point of exceeding its financial goals. From the start you sense that it's going to be a very practical and hands-on tutorial as it doesn't waste any time and jumps straight to setting up the development environment using Vagrant and a Linux VM.Interesting choice considering that nowadays most use Docker, but probably done so because Docker is mainly directed to containerization of applications and not to that of full blown OSs. So after setting up the environment we are next suggested two ways of installing Dancer.The first o...

Of course Gabor needs no introduction, but it's worth mentioning that his is a later attempt of publishing a book on the Dancer framework in general. The first one, which I covered in  Help Kickstart First Ever PerlDancer Book , was initiated by the Dancer's core devs themselves who unfortunately couldn't generate enough traction therefore the fund raising campaign failed. Fortunately this second campaign by Gabor proved successful to the point of exceeding its financial goals. From the start you sense that it's going to be a very practical and hands-on tutorial as it doesn't waste any time and jumps straight to setting up the development environment using Vagrant and a Linux VM.Interesting choice considering that nowadays most use Docker, but probably done so because Docker is mainly directed to containerization of applications and not to that of full blown OSs. full review on i-programmer.info

Documentation,the Achilles Heel of Open Source projects. How the Perl Dancer Web framework's core devs go about it Read on i-programmer

Does the dependency free nature of Mojolicious act as an invitation to people familiar with other frameworks (i.e. Ruby on Rails) and languages (i.e. PHP)? That aside, what other factors/features would lure such developers to the framework? SR: The dependency free nature of Mojolicious is actually more of a myth, the truth is that installing Mojolicious is simply a very fast and pleasant experience. One of the ways in which we’ve done this, is to make hard to install 3rd party modules like IO::Socket::SSL and Net::DNS::Native optional. full interview on Josettorama

Our journey into the world of Perl’s Web frameworks would not be complete without Mojolicious, therefore we talked to Sebastian Riedel, Mojolicious’ mastermind and Catalyst’s original founder. We looked at Mojolicious’ history: why Sebastian left Catalyst for Mojolicious , present: what does the framework actually do , the project’s future: Sebastian’s long-term plans , and whether Perl6 will have an effect on the project. We also get more technical with questions like why not opt for a DSL like Dancer does, what is meant by ‘real time web framework’ , whether the framework is dependency free and much more. full interview on Josettorama

The Web Development course sets out to teach you Dancer 2, a topic that will be unfamiliar to most. When starting out with something new you have the choice of possibly a book, if there is one, rely on the manual (good luck with that) or follow the sparse tutorials found in the blogosphere. Unstructured, time consuming, just not easy. What better way to get started than following a rapid, carefully planned curriculum, with structured, cohesive material and real world value? That’s exactly where this web based course steps in. full review on i-programmer

After we looked into Catalyst, we continue our exploration of Perl’s land of Web Frameworks, with Dancer.We talk about it to one of the core devs, Sawyer X, who kindly answered our questions in a very detailed and explanatory way, rendering the interview enjoyable and comprehensible even by non techies. The interview, which spans three parts (to be published weekly), did not stop there however; we also asked his opinion and knowledge on finer grained aspects of the craft that is developing for the Web, such as what the advantage of routing over query strings is, MVC vs Routes, Perl vs PHP vs Ruby, and why CGI.pm must die! Full interview on Josettorama

What about the other Perl frameworks, Dancer and Mojolicious? How do they compare to Catalyst? Dancer’s big strength is making things quick and easy for smaller apps; you don’t have to think in terms of OO unless you want to and plugins generally shove a bunch of extra keywords into your namespace that are connected to global or per-request variables. Where Catalyst doesn’t have an exact opinion about a lot of the structure of your code but very definitely insists that you pick one and implement it, Dancer basically lets you do whatever you like and not really think too much about it . That really isn’t meant as a criticism: somewhere along the line I picked up a commit bit to Dancer as well and they’ve achieved some really good things – providing something that’s as little conceptual overhead as possible for smaller apps, and something where there’s a very direct mapping between the concepts involved and what’s actually going to happen in terms of request dispatc...

Does all that flexibility come at a price? The key price is that while there are common ways to do things, you’re rarely going to find One True Way to solve any given problem. It’s more likely to be “here’s half a dozen perfectly reasonable ways, which one is best probably depends on what the rest of your code looks like”, plus while there’s generally not much integration specific code involved, everything else is a little more DIY than most frameworks seem to require. I can put together a catalyst app that does something at least vaguely interesting in a couple hours, but doing the sort of 5 minute wow moment thing that intro screencasts and marketing copy seem to aim for just doesn’t happen, and often when people first approach catalyst they tend to get a bit overwhelmed by the various features and the way you can put them together. There’s a reflex of “this is too much, I don’t need this!”. But then a fair percentage of them come back two or three years later, have ...

We talk to Matt S. Trout, technical team leader at consulting firm Shadowcat Systems Limited, creator of the DBIx::Class ORM and of many other CPAN modules, and of course co-maintainer of the Catalyst web framework. These are some of his activities, but for this interview we are interested in Matt’s work with Catalyst. Our discussion turned out not to be just about Catalyst though. While discussing the virtues of the framework, we learned, in Matt’s own colourful language, what makes other popular web frameworks tick, managed to bring the consultant out of him who shared invaluable thoughts on architecting software as well as on the possibility of Perl 6 someday replacing Perl 5 for web development. We concluded that there’s no framework that wins by knockout, but that the game’s winner will be decided on points, points given by the final judge, your needs. Full interview on Josettorama