Dancer workshop at London Perl Workshop 2011

Saturday, 12 November 2011 was the 2011 London Perl Workshop, held in the Cavendish Street Campus of Westminster University.

Andrew Solomon ran a hands-on training session entitled "Web development for beginners using Dancer", to help beginners to learn to use Dancer, Template Toolkit, learn the MVC concept, and understand structuring code for maintainability and using object orientation.

In all, there were 19 attendees (in a room with only 18 terminals).

Andew said that the students were very engaged, asking (and answering) valid questions until the end of the 2.5 hour class, and that almost all of them had a working web application up and running by the end of the session.

Many of the students reported that they found it much simpler to get started than they'd expected.

A quote from an attendee:

"... if I do ever try to get something up and running in Perl, I feel like I could probably do it with Dancer"

I also asked Andrew himself for his opinion, and he said:

"make sure you say how much I enjoyed presenting Dancer! The way high level concepts and the actual code are aligned, I think that Dancer will give Perl a place in the 'standard' university IT curriculum before too long."

All in all, it seems the workshop was well-received, helping raise the profile of Dancer and feedback from attendees confirms that Dancer is doing well at being a user-friendly framework which is easy for beginners to start working with, with an easy learning curve.

AUTHOR

David Precious