Thanks for signing up to my workshop on web development with Perl.
In six hours, I hope to persuade you that Modern Perl bears no relation to the language that you stopped using to write horrible CGI programs fifteen years ago and that it is well worth taking a look at when you are deciding which web technology to use.
We'll do that by writing a simple web application using modern Perl tools. Obviously in three hours we won't be able to create the next social media sensation, but we should have time to touch on many useful parts of the modern Perl web development toolkit.
In order to do that, you'll need to bring some equipment. Here's a list:
It would be great if you could have a Unix-like operating system installed (Linux or OSX). The examples should all work on Windows, but I can't guarantee it. If you have a Windows laptop, then a good workaround is to install something like VirtualBox and set-up a Linux VM.
The application that we write will have a database at its backend. I'll be working with MySQL (actually MariaDB), but if you're happier with Postgres or SQLite they should both work fine too. I'll supply table definitions and some basic data, but if you're using something other than MySQL it's possible that those files will need some light editing before you can use them.
One advantage of modern Perl web applications is that their implementation is completely separate from their deployment environment. In order to demonstrate that it would be nice if if you had a couple of deployment environments installed on you laptop. The obvious choice is Apache, which means that we can try out both CGI and mod_perl installations.
But the preferred way to deploy modern Perl apps is as a daemon process running behind a proxy server. In order to try that, you should have nginx installed.
The code for the example application will be available from Github, so you will need Git installed in order to clone the repository.
You'll (obviously, I hope!) need a version of Perl. One advantage of the Unix-like operating systems, is that they will almost certainly come with Perl installed. If you're running the examples on Windows, then I recommend Strawberry Perl.
Your version of Perl should be as recent as possible. The most recent
version is currently is 5.22.1, but anything from 5.10 onwards should
work. If you want to install a more recent version of Perl than you
get with your OS, I recommend perlbrew.
Modern Perl development is largely a case of plumbing together the right modules in the right order, so it's highly recommended that you get familiar with installing modules.
Many of the modules that we will be using are available from your
Linux distribution's standard repositories and can therefore be
installed using yum, apt-get or whatever similar command you use.
On other operating systems (or if you want more control over the
installation process) you will need to install the modules manually. I
recommend using cpan to install App::cpanminus and using cpanm
from then on.
The modules you will need are as follows:
- Plack
- Dancer2
- Template
- Moose
- MooseX::NonMoose
- MooseX::MarkAsMethods
- DateTime
- DateTime::Format::Strptime
- DBI
- DBD::* This is the database driver for the database system that you are using. It will probably be DBD::mysql, DBD::Pg or DBD::SQLite
- DBIx::Class
- DBIx::Class::Schema
- Dancer2::Plugin::DBIC
- DateTime::Format::MySQL (or ::Pg or ::SQLite)
The example code is available on Github. If you want to look at it before the workshop, please feel free, but be aware that it might well be updated right up to the last moment as I am tweaking the materials.
The code is at https://github.com/davorg/webdev-workshop/
Please ensure that you have a local checkout of this code before arriving at the workshop.
If you have any other questions, please contact me on:
- dave@perlhacks.com
- @davorg
- Perl Hacks (http://perlhacks.com/) - my Perl blog