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.

As explained on the mailing list, we had the idea to schedule a monthly meeting in Paris for people interested in Dancer’s development (users are welcome as well, of course).

The first meeting takes place this evening, in order not to come with empty hands, I’ll write down here a list of topics I’d like to discuss with the team:

• “Linux Mag” articles : Franck and I have planed to write a serie of three articles about Dancer and Plack for the french “Linux Magazine”. I already have a first draft of the first article
• Dancer 1.2 release : discussions about plans, key-feature, and maybe a timeline for the next major release of Dancer.
• What about the mountable feature ? A recent whishlist item was posted to our issue tracker, the idea is pretty interesting, but implies a major rewrite of Dancer’s internals. Should we open a new branch where Dancer’s core willm be basically rewritten?

Stay tuned for the report…