I’m just back from FPW 2010 and I want to write this blog entry right now, while everything is still fresh in my mind. Lots of things happened regarding Dancer and I want to sum them up here.

my Perl Dancer talk (update)

Now that Slideshare has finally processed my slides, I can embed them here, enjoy.

BibLibre, Dancer and authentication middlewares

First of all I’ve met Marc Chantreux who works for BibLibre and wants to use Dancer at work.

Marc is looking for the good way to implement an authentication layer for his Dancer app. Looks like the way to go is with a Plack::Middelware. Indeed, Franck Cuny explained us that middlewares are a really great way to address this kind of feature. That way the authentication layer is separated from the application. Thanks to his Dancer::Session::PSGI, this could be done really easily.

I’m really glad Marc and his company give so much interest and trust into Dancer, I’m pleased to see such things happening and I’m going to give them as much help as I can in their daily needs with Dancer.

Not to mention that Marc already contributed an interesting patch to Dancer’s code, providing better pattern matching and named-captures support in our route handlers. He also appeared to be very motivated and had plenty of ideas and questions regarding Dancer’s development. I’m sure he can become quickly a regular contributor to the project.

About WebSocket support in Dancer

I’ve talked a lot with Franck about Dancer, that was really interesting to met him in real life for a couple of days and share ideas and remarks regarding our code.

I’ve asked him about websocket support and it appears that it’s “just” a matter of having a non-blocking “request handler”. Dancer is not currently non-blocking, unless you choose to deploy with Plack and Twiggy. What we plan to do is to provide a third handler, named Dancer::Handler::Async which would depend on Twiggy and would force a non-blocking context. But we have to investigate more prcesiely that. Franck is willing to dig in that direction, so maybe we can have more to say in a month or two.

A Dancer implementation in Perl 6 ?

After my talk about Dancer – you can grab the slides here – I’ve been at a Perl 6 workshop that was handled by Martin Berends. We first started to install rakudo and he showed me some Perl 6 stuff. Then we ended up talking about … well, guess what, Dancer :)

He was very excited about the project. He then suggested the idea of a Perl 6 implementation. Martin already implemented an HTTP::Daemon module for Perl 6, and I suggested to look at HTTP::Server::Simple::PSGI which would be the very first dependency Dancer would need. That would be awesome to have Dancer in Perl 6, wouldn’t it?

Well, I hope I don’t forget anything important to say in this report, the event was great, and I should stop writing now and go take some rest :)

Happy hacking.