The Twelve Days of Dancer, 2023 Edition

Well, we made it another year! 2023 is about to ride off into the sunset, and 2024 is just around the corner. It's been a while since we've done one of these, and the Dancer Core Team thought that with the exciting year we've had, how better to wrap up the year with pretty paper and a bow than to celebrate with the 2023 installment of the Twelve Days of Dancer!

State of the Dancer

This has been an exciting year for Dancer2, and another lap around the sun for Dancer(1).

Dancer2 1.0.0

The big news of 2023 is the release of Dancer2 1.0.0. This is perhaps the most exciting release of Dancer2 since it first found its way into the Perl community; possibly ever!

With this release, we're very publicly planting the flag that Dancer2 is stable and ready for the big time. But anyone who's used Dancer2 in the last 6 or 7 years already knew that, didn't you? :-)

So, why now? What happened? Let's take a peek behind the curtain and see how this all happened.

July in Toronto

On a warm, sunny July day in Toronto, three core team members (Sawyer, Yanick, and Jason), found themselves in close proximity for the first time in a long while. Seizing this rare opportunity, they decided to commandeer a table near the conference's registration area. Their mission? To chart the future course of Dancer2's journey towards greater heights in the world of web development. Or something like that.

GeekRuthie, a long time vocal supporter and contributor to Dancer and its community, also happened to be at the conference, was able to join the meeting to help shape what the future world of Dancer2 dominance would look like.

We cogitated and brainstormed and schemed and marshalled our resources, and laid out what the next release of Dancer2 should look like, lined up our troops, and sprang into action.

But what to call it?

As we hammered out details of the next release, the question arose of what version number to use. Should it be 0.500000? 0.450000? 123456? The more we talked, the further away that answer became.

It was then Yanick came up with the most amazing idea: the next version should be 1.0.0.

Dancer2 had been stable for years at that point. We were spending too much time on determining a version number, when really we could just jump to 1.0.0, go with a simpler versioning scheme that everyone understood (including us!), and giving us a few extra clock cycles to spend on more important things (like dinner).

We ironed out a few more details, and once the conference wrapped up, the hard work began. It took longer than we had originally anticipated, but finally, Dancer2 1.0.0 was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

The community feedback on this has been amazing, and exceeded our wildest expectations. Thank you so much for your support and glowing reception of this release!

New core member!

The meeting in Toronto directly led to the GeekRuthie joining the Dancer Core Team. We're excited to have her as part of the team; Ruth's software development and social skills, plus her great ideas, are a wonderful, welcomed addition to the team.

Dancer(1)

David Precious (bigpresh) continues to oversee Dancer(1). While it requires minimal attention, allowing more focus on Dancer2, we remain committed to its maintenance. We'll keep the community updated on any significant changes to Dancer(1).

Questions for the Community

We have a few questions and invitations for our community:

• Porting of Dancer(1) Plugins

  We have a wishlist of Dancer plugins to be ported to Dancer2 on our wiki.

  Are you interested in tackling any of these? Let us know and we'll offer whatever assistance and moral support that we can!

  If there's more you'd like to see ported, we encourage you to add to the wiki.

• GitHub Discussions

  With the launch of Dancer2 1.0.0, we also enabled GitHub Discussions for Dancer2. Do you find this to be valuable? Would you prefer to stick to IRC and the mailing list? Are there other avenues of communication (Slack, Discord, etc.) you'd like us to pursue?

• Future Direction

  Is there something you'd like to see in Dancer2 that we haven't addressed? We'd love to hear about it!

  Open an issue on GitHub, post to our mailing list, or start a discussion on GitHub. Our goal is to best serve the needs of our community, and we rely on your feedback and ideas to make that happen.

Let's Dance!

Grab that framework and bust a move on the dancefloor! Enjoy our carefully curated selection of articles, and grow your Dancer toolbox just a bit more. We hope these inspire you to further engage and participate in this wonderful community.

Author

This article has been written by Jason Crome (CromeDome) for the Twelve Days of Dancer.

Copyright

No copyright retained. Enjoy.

Jason A. Crome / CromeDome