Another year of Dancing...

Welcome to the Dancer advent calendar!

We skipped last year's advent calendar, but we're hoping the articles we gathered this year will help you learn more about Dancer and specifically Dancer2, which is the target version of all new applications.

We will show changes Dancer2 has made, features it recently added, a few tricks, and even survey the code - as well as mention some of our numerous community contributors, and take a look at the project as a whole.

More and more dancers...

Usage of Dancer continues to grow, with more new users added to the dancefloor.

If you're using Dancer in your company and would like to appear on the dancefloor page, please contact us.

Dancer has been spotted as a required/desired skill in several job adverts, showing the increased uptake of Dancer in corporate web apps. Try searching for Dancer on jobs.perl.org.

Dancer2 - a reality

Far more progress has been made with Dancer2. It is now a fully usable, robust replacement for Dancer 1. That said, Dancer 1 will continue to be supported for some time yet and continues to receive bugfixes, support, and minor improvements.

This article will focus mainly on Dancer2.

Dancer at LPW2013

Andrew Solomon ran a free two-hour Dancer 2 training course at last year's London Perl Workshop. Andrew's course was a hands-on training session to develop a website with dynamic content using Dancer, during which the attendees would:

  • Learn about Dancer2 as a framework and as a language
  • Implement route handlers using sessions and hooks
  • Implement views, templates, and layouts using Template Toolkit and Bootstrap
  • Understand the concept of Model-View-Controller
  • Experience structuring code for maintainability
  • Experience using object oriented Perl modules
  • Understand all the crazy jargon above!

See also Andrew's Perl Web Development course on geekuni.com.

DancerConf

This year in Hancock, New York, the first Dancer conference was held. It had trainings on Dancer (and Dancer2), DBIx::Class, and other related technologies.

We plan on having another conference in 2015 as well.

Dancer IRC channel community grows

The community of helpful users on the Dancer IRC channel continues to grow! You can find us on irc.perl.org in #dancer or irc://irc.perl.org/dancer if your system is configured to support irc:// links.

If you do not regularly use IRC but wish to join us, there is also a web IRC client available at http://dancer.pm/irc for ease of use.

AUTHORS

David Precious (BIGPRESH)

Sawyer X (XSAWYERX)