[dancer-users] Why learn Dancer?

[Warren Young]

On 7/3/2014 10:07, Andrew Solomon wrote:
> Anyway, I'd like to
> know peoples' views on whether this is a healthy approach to
> developing maintainable web apps.

Consider this complexity continuum:

    CGI::* < mod_perl < Apache::ASP < Dancer < Catalyst < CMS

This does not say that everything eventually becomes a CMS, or that 
everything is based on CGI or mod_perl at bottom.  It just ranks web 
frameworks by increasing complexity.  The more the web framework does 
for you out of the box, the greater the complexity, but also the more 
policy it tends to drag along with it.

Web frameworks occupy a span along the continuum, not a single spot. 
Some spans are wider than others.  Rails, Django and Catalyst all 
roughly overlap, Mason+Poet roughly overlaps Dancer, etc.  I show 
Apache::ASP to the left of Dancer only because it isn't as big or 
complex as Dancer, but in reality, there's considerable overlap.  Drupal 
is so flexible a CMS that the leftward edge of its span overlaps 
Catalyst's space on the continuum.

At the far left, you are given almost no tools, but you have ultimate 
freedom.

The farther to the right you go, the more your end application needs to 
match the preconceived notions that went into the framework.

Some people try to fight this.  They will build something other than a 
CMS on top of Drupal, or a non-MVC app on top of Catalyst, or a 
non-DBMS-backed app on top of Rails.  These are all signs that you 
should have started with something farther left on the continuum.

You can make the opposite mistake, too.  If you're building a CMS on top 
of Dancer, you're probably reinventing many perfectly good wheels.

Finding the right place along the continuum can be tricky.  When you 
choose Catalyst over Dancer, you are buying into a set of policies and 
assumptions.  Catalyst assumes that MVC is a good design for your app, 
that you have a DBMS, that it makes sense to connect the DBMS directly 
to the web app, and that it makes sense to use the web framework's ORM 
to do that.  I chose Dancer over Catalyst because three of those four 
assumptions are untrue for my app.

That is to say, I moved to the left until I stopped violating framework 
assumptions.  I went no farther left than I had to because I have no 
wish to build up my own framework from the stone knives and bearskins 
level of technology.

Dancer is at an interesting position on the complexity continuum.  It is 
just to the left of the border where features start turning into policy 
and design.  The best reason to choose Dancer is when you are building 
something that isn't already designed and implemented.