Dancer2 - starting anew

It has a different namespace, a different release manager, and a different repo - Dancer2 sounds like a completely new thing, which it is. But it also isn't.

The portsmith's history

Dancer started as a Perl port of Sinatra - a successful light web framework in Ruby. The author of Dancer, Alexis Sukrieh (AKA, sukria), who is also a Ruby programmer, had enjoyed it so much, he wanted something similar in Perl. He then began the task of porting Sinatra to Perl under the name Dancer.

Dancer had become very successful. In fact it had been so successful a wonderful warm community grew around it. Users and developers alike sharing their use cases, giving talks, trainings, writing articles, and even making it part of their job.

When Dancer became a production framework in various companies, a major flaw in the design had creeped into sight: the global state. (Chime in with horror music.)

Many components in Dancer were globals and this shared state made it impossible to have multiple applications without side-effects. Sukria had gone underground and returned with Dancer 2. A completely rewritten framework, based on the same principle as Dancer, sharing the same DSL and overall design, but lacking the global state which had crippled Dancer so.

This version promised to be the noble successor.

The version that never was

Unfortunately the code was still incompatible in some ways. Plugins, mainly, did not work, since the architecture was vastly different. We wanted to release both a 2.0 branch and a 1.0 branch, but CPAN does not allow that. We then decided to split the namespace to allow both versions to exist at the same time while we iron out the missing bits. Considering Mongrel2 and even Perl's Amon2, why not Dancer2?

After a few releases, Sukria had to attend to more pressing issues, and Dancer2 received little attention. Sawyer, who had become the project leader for production version of Dancer, took Dancer2, and Yanick Champoux, the amazing French Canadian, had taken the production version of Dancer under his wing - one of many wings, in fact.

The prodigal daughter

Following multiple big releases, Dancer2 had become ready for mass usage. It has a few rough edges, but in most ways, it's in fact much more reliable.

Dancer2 has the following advantages over Dancer 1, amongst others:

• Composable Dancer Applications

  Dancer2 Apps are composable units that take care of their own dispatching. While we have the original dance behavior to dispatch over all registered applications, we now have much better mechanisms to handle separate applications without forcing the user to have all or nothing.

  This Advent Calendar will feature an article showcasing this functionality with plenty of explanations on the matter.

• Decoupled DSL implementation

  The DSL implementation in Dancer2 is decoupled in a way that allows us to improve it without changing it for the users. In fact, Dancer2 shares the majority of the DSL with Dancer 1 and we can keep that working as expected.

• Successful object system

  Instead of rolling our own objects, Dancer2 uses Moo, which provides the same behavior as Moose for all the objects we have. It allows us to have much smarter objects than we did before with lazy attributes, attribute builders, role composition, and more.

• Better development server

  Dancer2 uses the Plack core development server, HTTP::Server::PSGI, which provides a more reliable experience. In the past, for Dancer 1, we had to work around a lot of problems with the development server.

• Less specialized code

  Dancer 1 contained a lot of unnecessary code which was removed in favor of a proper implementation around Plack: this includes the command line parsing when importing the DSL, static file serving, testing code, and more.

• Robust CLI capabilities

  The command-line interface in Dancer2 is written in App::Cmd, which allows us to extend it fully, providing interesting command-line features.

  We haven't yet gone nuts with it, but now we'll be able to do so, and we have a few interesting ideas.

• Devoted set of developers

  While Dancer version 1 has been placed into freeze mode, Dancer2 has a group of developers devoted to it. More and more developers have joined the core team as well. This includes the aforementioned Yanick, Russell Jenkins, Mickey Nasriachi, Stefan Hornburg (Racke), Steven Humphrey, Alberto Simões, and David Precious. Somewhere in there Sawyer X is probably there, but we can't attest to that - at least not legally.

At the end of the day, though, there is one major consideration we've yet to mention.

The version that is

While many users are still on Dancer 1, Dancer2 is ready and waiting, and we're pooling all of our efforts to improving it. Dancer 1 is on freeze mode, meaning no new features.

Dancer2 is NOT a new framework, it is simply the next version. When asked in the past, we explained that this isn't Perl 5 and Perl 6.

Dancer2 might have a few rough edges, but it's much more reliable, correct, featureful, and a much safer bet than Dancer 1.

Conclusion

Please consider writing your new code in Dancer2 and also porting any major applications you want to continue to develop. If you find difficulties in the process, please let us know, so we could fix them.

Be careful though, that's the first step to becoming a contributor! :)

Author

This article has been written by Sawyer X for the Perl Dancer Advent Calendar 2014.

Copyright

No copyright retained. Enjoy.

2014 // Sawyer X <xsawyerx@cpan.org>