---
date: 2010-04-19T00:00:00Z
summary: In which we look at Dancer's ecosystem.
title: The Dancer Ecosystem
---
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:
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:
```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;
};
```
## 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.
```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} };
```
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.
```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};
};
```
### Dancer::Plugin::SiteMap
With this plugin, by James Ronan, a sitemap of your application is created.
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.
## 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.