[Dancer-users] My dancer app

[Alex Knowles]

On Wed, 2011-03-09 at 14:04 +0000, Alexis Sukrieh wrote:
> Le 09/03/2011 12:15, Alex Knowles a écrit :
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Just to let you know after a fair bit of hard work here's our new dancer
> > powered site:
> >
> > http://www.moonfruit.com/
> 
> Oh. My. God. :-)
> 
> This is... awesome!
> 

thank you very much, we're very happy with it.

> > The app itself is fairly lite, and basically does API calls to our main
> > system backend via json-rpc.
> >
> > all very exciting.
> >
> > Cheers for some awesome software.
> 
> I'd love to have more details (if possible) about what the Dancer 
> application does. Just out of curiosity.
> 
> Thanks a lot for trusting our work, we are very proud to see Dancer 
> going live for real-life kickass websites!
> 
> This is definitely a great day for Dancers.
> 

I'll write a post on blogs.perl.org at some point soon, and send the
link out, but in the meantime :)

The main Moonfruit service allows users to create sites in flash in a
handy draggy droppy way (it being flash). 

To do this we have a sprawling, slightly legacy, (but getting much
better) Plack based set of API's.

The plan was to upgrade the portal from this:

http://old.moonfruit.com

(which was basically completely static html)

to a shiny web 2.<whatever we're on now> dynamic system.

So we have 3 collections of routes (ish):
MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal.pm
MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal/API.pm
MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal/Support.pm

1: Serving the HTML. 

My filthy Assistants (*) put the html into TT (which they'd learnt on a
previous project (which was rendering the flash objects into html for
desktop and mobile devices)).  

The html pages aren't that dynamic, as it's all done by writing to the
DOM with ajax (strictly speaking i guess it's ajaj since we use json)
but probably a: will be and b: should be :)

This is pretty standard Dancer / TT stuff, take route, drop a template
with some stuff.  We have some quite nice bits to set things like the
footer nav on start up from a conf file, which is also used to serve
sitemap.xml (in an idea stolen from Dancer::Plugin::Sitemap) :), but
basically this part is all straight route->template type thing.

One nice thing about using dancer was that once I'd built a very basic
platform for the html pages the front end guys were building TT and
filling out mock data in the app so they could develop the front end on
their own.

<insert gag about dancer being so simple a front end engineer can use it
here> :)

2: API calls to the backend.
This is the meat of the app, as mentioned above, we could flatten most
of the html and serve it statically at the moment.

The dynamic bits: logging in, fetching site information, billing info
etc etc are all done with a REST (ish) interface in a separate package,
using the very sexy and fabulous Dancer::Plugin::REST

This then uses 
MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal/Plugin/JSONRPC.pm

This registers a method api_call which does authenticated JSON RPC to
our main api, by doing things like:

get '/some-resty-url/all.:format' => sub {
	my $url="/<somebackend-api-call>/";
	my $method="doSomething";
	my $params=["all"];
	my ( $data, $error ) = api_call( $url, $method, $params );
	return status_bad_gateway("api not available") if $error;
	# do some stuff with the data, maybe make a secondary api call
	# knit it all together	
	return $data;
};

The main parts of the call are handled by conf & the plugin.

I'm using JSON::RPC::Client to do this.

3: Support calls.

We're using zendesk (**) to do handle our front line support for the
product (which is new with this release), and we're using their Remote
auth (***), so there's a pile of interesting and smart stuff involved in
that.

If you click on a link with /zendesk/ (which should really
be /support/*) you get redirected via their remote login system if
you're logged into our portal, which then logs you into there.

That's basically it.  There's a few interesting bits and bobs, and I
hope to be able to release some stuff back out to CPAN - I'm pleased
with the JSON::RPC plugin, and the zendesk integration (in fact a
general zendesk api perl module would be useful).  

Oh and there's a pretty much throwaway plugin:

MF-Portal/lib/MF/Portal/Plugin/ConfigBackup.pm

which is for lazy loading - on startup the slow moving data is fetched
then stored in a tmp file in case something goes away.

Oh and session handling is done with Dancer::Plugin::Memcached

although i'm looking at subclassing that to do selective sessions (ie
only drop a cookie on session->flush) - it's written just not tested
yet.

Anyway, that's it!

I'm really glad you like it, hopefully now it's out and the load is off
a bit I hope to be able to give back a bit to the community.

Cheers!

Alex
ps. sorry this seems to have gone on a bit, maybe i'll just cut and
paste this into blogs.perl.org :)

*: http://tinyurl.com/3xr7rsg (ok they're the front end part of the
team)
**: http://zendesk.com/
***: http://www.zendesk.com/api/remote-authentication