State of Dancer on Perl 6

Bailador is growing better and bigger and starts to resemble a real tool more and more. Let’s see what new features it has gained recently.

Remember the first example in perldoc Dancer? It’s not really different in Bailador:

use Bailador;
get '/hello/:name' => sub ($name) {
    return "Why, hello there $name"
}
baile;

Aside of being a little Spanished, what did it give us? We have subroutine signatures in Perl 6 so we can pass the :name parameter to the sub; there’s no need to use param() now: it’s gone.

You don’t need to pass everything using GET of course. post keyword is also supported.

post '/' => sub {
    return request.params.perl
}

The above will print something like ("foo" => "bar").hash, if fed with appropriate request.

any() is a reserved keyword in Perl 6, and while you can use it, it means a completely different thing. Instead of any('get', 'post') you can just do it like this:

get post '/' => sub {
    if request.is_get {
        return "I am GET"
    } else {
        return request.params.perl
    }
}

post, as well as get return their arguments, so you can chain them like in the example above. It also shows the joy of request object, which you can use to inspect the request being processed. It’s not as cool as Dancer::Request, but it does the job, being quite small and simple.

What else do we have? Let’s show off a bit and write a simple-simple pastebin webapp.

use Bailador;

unless 'data'.IO ~~ :d {
    mkdir 'data'
}

get '/' => sub {
    template 'index.tt'
}

post '/new_paste' => sub {
    my $t  = time;
    my $c = request.params<content>;
    unless $c {
        return "No empty pastes please";
    }
    my $fh = open "data/$t", :w;
    $fh.print: $c;
    $fh.close;
    return "New paste available at paste/$t";
}

get /paste\/(.+)/ => sub ($tag) {
    content_type 'text/plain';
    if "data/$tag".IO.f {
        return slurp "data/$tag"
    }
    status 404;
    return "Paste does not exist";
}

baile;

Holy cow, what’s that! Let’s go there piece by piece. First, we’ll create a data directory if it doesn’t already exist. No black magic here, let’s proceed. What’s next? Templates! Here we just load index.tt, not passing any parameters, but that works too and some example apps use that in their example templates.

The handler of new_paste uses our well-known request object again, and creates a new file for a paste, identified by the current time.

The last get block uses some nifty features, so let’s take a look. It uses regexes, and you can see that they also cooperate with subroutine parameters without black magic. We then set a content_type as we’ll do in Dancer, and send status 404 if no paste have been found. Easy peasy? I suppose so. That’s it, it works like a charm.

Thus we’ve covered all the features in Bailador as for now. I don’t think it’s that poor, as for about 100 lines of code.

What’s next? What’s missing? You tell me. Or you contribute; the code is dead simple and implementing stuff like before(), after(), before_template() etc should be a matter of 3-5 lines, I think. Feel encouraged to look into the code and hack on it. If you have any questions, suggestions or criticism, don’t hesitate to tell, or poke me on #perl @ Freenode. Have fun!

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