Even though it's still a young project, an active community is starting
to emerge around Dancer. Some modules start to appear on CPAN and github
to add functionalities, or to extend existing ones.
** Templates
By default, Dancer comes with support for two templating systems:
Template Toolkit and Dancer::Template::Simple, a small templating engine
written by sukria. But support for other templating systems are
available:
- Dancer::Template::Tenjin by ido
- Dancer::Template::Sandbox by Sam Graham
- Dancer::Template::Tiny by Sawyer
- Dancer::Template::MicroTemplate by me
- Dancer::Template::Mason by Yanick Champoux
- Dancer::Template::Haml by David Moreno
** Logger
Out of the box, Dancer only has a simple logging system to write to
file, but more logging sytems are available:
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Dancer::Logger::Syslog by sukria
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Dancer::Logger::LogHandler by me
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Dancer::Logger::PSGI by me
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The last one is for writing directly your log message via Plack. You can
use a middleware like P::M::LogDispatch or P::M::Log4perl to handle logs
for your application. Even better, if you use P::M::ConsoleLogger, you
can have logs from your Dancer application in your javascript console.
** Debug
To debug your application with Plack, you can use the awesome
Plack::Middleware::Debug. I've writen Dancer::Debug (which requires my
fork of P::M::Debug), a middleware that add panels, with specific
informations for Dancer applications.
To activate this middleware, update your app.psgi to make it look like
this:
#+BEGIN_SRC perl
my $handler = sub {
my $env = shift;
my $request = Dancer::Request->new($env);
Dancer->dance($request);
};
$handler = builder {
enable "Debug", panels => [
qw/Dancer::Settings Dancer::Logger Environment Memory
ModuleVersions Response Session Parameters Dancer::Version /
];
$handler;
};
#+END_SRC
** Plugins
Dancer has support for plugins since a few version. There is not a lot
of plugins at the moment, but this will soon improve. Plugins support is
one of the top priorities for the 1.2 release.
*** Dancer::Plugin::REST
This one is really nice. This plugin, used with the serialization stuff,
allow you to write easily REST application.
#+BEGIN_SRC perl
resource user => get => sub { # return user where id = params->{id} },
create => sub { # create a new user with params->{user} },
delete => sub { # delete user where id = params->{id} },
update => sub { # update user with params->{user} };
#+END_SRC
And you got the following routes:
- GET /user/:id
- GET /user/:id.:format
- POST /user/create
- POST /user/create.:format
- DELETE /user/:id
- DELETE /user/:id.:format
- PUT /user/:id
- PUT /user/:id.:format
*** Dancer::Plugin::Database
This plugin, by bigpresh, add the database keyword to your app.
#+BEGIN_SRC perl
use Dancer;
use Dancer::Plugin::Database;
# Calling the database keyword will get you a connected DBI handle:
get '/widget/view/:id' => sub {
my $sth = database->prepare('select * from widgets where id = ?',
{}, params->{id});
$sth->execute;
template 'display_widget', {widget => $sth->fetchrow_hashref};
};
#+END_SRC
*** Dancer::Plugin::SiteMap
With this plugin, by James Ronan, a sitemap of your application is
created.
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Plugin module for the Dancer web framwork that automagically adds
sitemap routes to the webapp. Currently adds /sitemap and /sitemap.xml
where the former is a basic HTML list and the latter is an XML document
of URLS.
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</blockquote>
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** you can help! :)
There is still a lot of stuff to do. Don't hesitate to come on
#dancer@irc.perl.org to discuss ideas or new features that you would
like.
