The Twelve Days of Dancer
Hello and goodbye, 2018! It seems like we hardly knew you. It's been a few years since our last calendar, and while everyone here is busy with other projects, we still wanted to give you a mini-advent-calendar this year. Welcome to the Twelve Days of Dancer!
This year's calendar features twelve posts that cover a wide range of topics. We feature several new authors, cover some new ground (for us!) with an article on accessibility, and even have a crossover post showing how Dancer can be used with other frameworks.
Without further ado, let's dance!
State of the Dancer
In 2017 and 2018, we saw fewer but more significant updates to Dancer and Dancer2. With Dancer (1) being in maintenance mode, updates come only when significant bugs are found, security vulnerabilities are found, or when a change is proposed that greatly improve the lives of Dancer developers. David Precious has been the light that guides Dancer(1) through the night, and has been an excellent resource for both the Dancer and Dancer2 communities on IRC and email.
Meanwhile, Dancer2 continues to grow and evolve, though at a less frantic rate than earlier in its lifetime. Throughout the last two years, we've seen a growing list of contributions from our community, through documentation improvements, bug fixes, and new features.
At the end of 2017, the Dancer Core Team ran a survey of Dancer developers to get community input on the Dancer project. We received an excellent response to the survey, and it is being used to help guide the future direction of Dancer and its community. The results of this survey will be discussed in tomorrow's article.
New Features
Several significant new features came to pass since the last Advent Calendar:
Websockets
You asked, and Yanick delivered! Dancer2::Plugin::Websocket enables websockets from within your Dancer2 applications. To make this work properly, a non-blocking, streaming Plack server is needed (such as Twiggy).
Mutable Serializer
Dancer2 can now properly deserialize and serialize content based upon the request headers. Even better, it's completely and easily configurable! Thanks to veryrusty for spearheading the effort to get this working!
No Default Middleware
To support ETags and other similar features, the default Plack middleware used
by Dancer2 can get in the way. To get around this, veryrusty added a
no_default_middleware configuration option to Dancer2's config.yml file
to keep your application from using the default bundling of Plack middleware.
Better Documentation
Several dozen bug fixes, clarifications, and other enhancements have been made to the documentation, primarily by the Dancer2 community. As a result, the quality of existing docs has been greatly improved.
Several new examples have been added to both the Dancer2 distribution as well as the tutorial.
Sawyer has started a significant project to rebuild the Dancer2 documentation from scratch. The current docs lack a good description of why Dancer does things a certain way, and doesn't give new users a good grounding in web application design to know how and why some things should be done the way we've recommended. The new doc project aims to address this by detailing important concepts in a clear and simple way.
Performance Improvements
Several important performance improvements were made to Dancer2, the most
important of which being the migration from MooX::Types to Type::Tiny.
When Type::Tiny::XS is used, the boost is even more significant.
Security Improvements
Two important security features were added:
The session engine now requires a validate_id() method to be implemented in
the various session engines. This requirement shuts down an attack vector by
making session IDs conform to a known format.
SysPete implemented a change_session_id keyword to easily change the
current session ID. This is a common (and recommended) security practice,
especially when privilege level changes within an application.
Author
This article has been written by Jason Crome (CromeDome) for the Perl Dancer Advent Calendar 2018.
Copyright
No copyright retained. Enjoy.
Jason A. Crome