Shall we dance?

A few months ago I start working on a new Perl web application. I wanted to do it in Ruby on Rails but the client request to be in Perl for supportability reasons, this means: "If you go, will be easier and cheaper to find a Perl developer than a Ruby developer.". No matter how many reasons, pro and cons I presented, the final decision was to do the web application in Perl.

I was in the task to find a Perl web framework as good as Rails for Ruby. There are a ton of Perl web frameworks but the most famous or known and the top 3 I choose were: Catalysis. Mojolicious and Dancer. You can google and read a lot of comparisons about all of them and take your own decision about which to use for your application. I choose Dancer.

I do not want to criticize the other frameworks. Every framework or language are good but you need to choose one that fit the needs and requirements of your project. At that time I thought Catalysis would be a huge framework for this application, now I think it can fit perfectly because the application grow more than I expected or analyzed. Regarding Mojolicious, I tried once and I did not find enough documentation at that time, by the time I was comparing those 3 frameworks it continue to lack of documentation.

Dancer, as you can read in the excellent documented Dancer site, http://www.perldancer.org/, is a "simple but powerful web application framework for Perl", it was inspired in Sinatra, another Ruby web application framework. Then I read all the excellent documentation, tutorials and training; if you do it, I think you will also choose Dancer.

Dancer is a RESTful framework, just like Sinatra. I was looking something more MVC like Rails but I did not find a good, known and well documented framework in Perl. So, I give a try to REST and Dancer. If you are like me, looking for a MVC or Rails-like Perl framework, Dancer is not the answer but unfortunately there is no answer yet. If you know some framework, please, share your comments.

Even thought Dancer is well documented I had some difficulties to find well explained documents about how to use some modules or how to do some specific things or what modules were the best or recommended. So, base on that I decided to document what I have done and maybe it would be useful for you too. Also, I hope to receive feedback and we all can learn more about how to dance with Perl.

So, say no more ... Shall we dance?