Here is my quick report of the first Dancer meeting that took place last thursday in Paris.

• We started the meeting by demonstrating how Dancer and Plack middlewares can be powerful and easy-to-use. We did a live demo of a scaffolded Dancer app configured to run with Plack::Middleware::Debug. That was neat. Just editing the config file allows you to enable and disable middlewares, you don’t even need to know about Plack::Builder, Dancer does all the black-magick for you. I ended the demo by showing how to get all your logging messages in your Firebug console thanks to Plack::Middleware::ConsoleLogger and Dancer::Logger::PSGI. That was a piece of cake:
  1. $ sudo cpanm Plack::Middleware::ConsoleLogger Dancer::Logger::PSGI
  2. in config.yml :

     logger: "PSGI"
     plack_middlewares:
       - ConsoleLogger:
     

  3. restart the app with plackup

  And that was it. Impressive :)

• We talked about the implications of supporting mountable Dancer applications inside Dancer’s core, in order to fix the whishlist item #82. We all agree on the fact that this would allow lots of good things (like generic reusable application bricks); but the rewrite needed is massive. We may wait for 1.2 to be released before starting wroking on that.
• We plan to write three articles for “Linux Magazine France”. The money earned by those articles will be spent in a pro GitHub account. The first article to be written is an introduction to Dancer, the second one should present PSGI/Plack and the third would explain how to use Dancer with Plack middlewares.
• Franck plans to work on an asynchronous handler so Dancer can be non-blocking. This would allow support for websockets.

Next meeting will probably occur in september as we may be very few in Paris during august.