Jason A. Crome

My involvement in Dancer is funny actually. Back in 2012 YAPC in Madison, Wisconsin, USA I was looking for a new web framework.

The one that I've been using kind of died out and I sat in a couple of talks and Sawyer, one of the project leads, he is a very engaging speaker and he had a really good talk about what Dancer was about. It really fit the way that I've worked and I submitted a couple of pull-requests to them that got incorporated. I really didn't get back to it until last fall and a project I was using used Dancer, and as I started to run into issues with docs and a coouple of bugs I've noticed, I've started to send in pull-requests and Sawyer contacted me and said, "You know if you keep doing this, then we are going to have to assimilate you into the core team," and a little bit later that's actually what happened.

But what Dancer is, it is a framework for building web applications. For those of you who are familiar with Perl, Perl has this great saying that "Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible." That's really a philosophy that the Dancer framework has stuck with. If you want to build a web app and get up and running quickly, then Dancer is a great framework to do it with.

If you've never done web programming, if you've never done Perl programming actually, it's a really nice entry point into the Perl ecosystem. If you are an experienced Perl programmer, you are not going to be disappointed either, because all of the power and flexibility that the Perl ecosystem allows you, you can channel that into your Dancer applications. You can make really large and elaborate web applications pretty easily. The framework takes care of a lot of things most of the web programmers don't want to think about all the time. It does those things really easily. Either through the core of the framework or through the number of plugins that it offers. It just does what you need it to and it kind of stays out of your way, it's great.