The discussion that is rising these days about frameworks and libraries reminds me I did not even take the time to talk about the last version of Dancer.
I should have, hence this post.

Last version of Dancer, 1.130, is the first version which is “plugin-aware”.
That means since 1.130 anyone can write their own template, logger or session engine and rock the app by just setting the appropriate value to the corresponding setting.

The plugins that existed before the split have been extracted from the core distribution in order to be shipped separately, that’s much clean and makes more sense that way:

• Dancer : the core framework, plus essential plugins
• Dancer::Logger::LogHandler : logger engine for Log::Handler (written by Frank Cuny)
• Dancer::Template::MicroTemplate : template engine for Text::MicroTemplate (written by Frank Cuny)
• Dancer::Session::Cookie : session engine based on encrypted cookie (written by Алексей Капранов)
• Dancer::Session::Memcached : session engine based on memcached

If you have a template, logger or session engine you’d like to see in Dancer’s ecosystem, I invite you to take a look at the corresponding interfaces you have to implement, it’s pretty straight forward.

The concept is pretty easy, basically, here are the steps to follow to add a new engine:

• choose a setting name that is available for template, session or logger, according to what you’re doing.
• implement the interface of the engine you like (Dancer::Template::Abstract, Dancer::Session::Abstract, Dancer::Logger::Abstract)
• Name your class with a camelized version of the setting name

Here is an example, let’s say you have a great template engine you’d love to use for rendering your views in your Dancer app, let’s name it “HTML::IronMark”.

• First of all, create Dancer::Template::Ironmark which implements the interface Dancer::Template::Abstract
• Then change the setting template to "ironmark"

And well, you’re done. This is pretty much the same job for logger and session engines.

Feel free to contact me if you want to write your own and need more precisions.