Wow. This year, OSDCfr was a pretty impressive event to stop by. There were many interesting people, such as Tom Preston-Werner – GitHub‘s CTO – who did a talk about… well, git, surprinsigly.

From my perspective, the event was even more exciting than I could expect, because I discussed a lot about Dancer, with many people. So I won’t cover the whole event in this blog entry, but I’ll focus on what happened around Dancer.

• Did my slideshow on saturday’s afternoon, it went pretty well. Everything was powered by Broadway, a small Dancer app I wrote two days before as a proof of concept and as a good excuse to do a live demo. My trick went well, I did not say to anyone I was doing a demo until the slideshow was finished: “Want a live demo? Well, you already had one.” – Good climax (and also, apparently a good way to counter Murphy’s law). In less than 50 lines of Dancer, I have a working slideshow engine with an ajax-based remote controller on my Android phone. Someone who saw it running even told me: “man, you almost have rewrote Apple’s Keynote software with Dancer!”. Cool time.
• Spoke with Martin Berends who is working on Perl 6 and wants to port Dancer. Martin told me he now has a working PSGI-aware HTTP server for Perl 6 (this is awesome!) and he will now be able to start hacking on the very first step to have Dancer in Perl 6 : the ability to define a route over PSGI, with Dancer’s sugar. During lunchtime, we discussed a bit about how to track memory leaks in Perl (we did find one recently in Dancer and were looking for advices, see below).
• Did a small hackaton with Franck after the lunch, we were focused on finding where the memory leak came from. We actually did! It’s an auto_reload bug (so it only appears when you start your Dancer app in the development environment with auto_reload set). I was already planning to drop the auto_reload feature, had pretty good reasons to do so, and now, I have just the proof maintaining it is just a pain in the ass. No need to wonder why the Sinatra team also decided to drop that kind of feature from their core. We’ll make a plugin for those who want to still use it, but definitely won’t maintain it in the core.
• Seen Nicolas Rennert’s talk about Hash-tables alogrithms and thoughts about how to parse a tree, the fast way. This made me think we could refactor the way Dancer parses its route tree, and maybe implement that as a vritual class (the same way we do for template, session or logger engines) in order to be able to switch from one route resolver to another
• Talked a bit with Philippe Bruhat about his project to write a tool to freeze a Dancer website. Basically, you have a local Dancer app, you run the magic script he has in mind and you get a static website you can just upload somewhere. His idea is interesting and I’m looking forward to see it. Apparently, this will be named WallFlower Pretty good name for a static dancer ;)
• Did a lightning talk with Franck about Jitterbug, our small continuous-integration tool for Perl project hosted on GitHub. Went pretty fast (we spoke about perlbrew, cpanminus, GitHub web hooks and Dancer, in less than 5 minutes!) not sure if everyone understood what it was about ;)
• At the end of the conference, did an interview about Dancer with Franck and Philippe Bruhat, for “Linux Magazine France”. More than 40 minutes of live discussion are recorded, Philippe should do a transcript soon. It was really interesting to do, it’s a great overview of the project, I’m sure the paper will be exciting to read.
• Spoke with some guys of the French Perl Foundation, they offered to sponsor our merchandising needs (basically the T-shirts print costs could be covered by the foundation). They find that Dancer is a good project and deserve their support. That’s great news! I’m honoured :)