Dancer2

Dancer2 is a Perl web application framework designed for quickly building web apps and RESTful services with minimal boilerplate. It is inspired by Ruby's Sinatra and provides routing, template rendering, and JSON handling. It uses PSGI, Perl's standard interface for web applications, analogous to Ruby's Rack or Python's WSGI.

Dancer2 is a rewrite of the original Dancer framework with a cleaner, fully object-oriented architecture that supports running multiple applications in the same process. The original Dancer used a more functional style with package-global state that made multiple-app scenarios problematic. The two share a similar API, so migrating is relatively straightforward for most projects.

Yes, Dancer2 applications run via PSGI, so they can be deployed using any PSGI-compatible server such as Plack, Starman, or Gazelle behind a reverse proxy like nginx or Apache. The framework includes a built-in development server for testing. Production deployments typically use Starman or Gazelle for better performance.

Yes, Dancer2 has a collection of plugins available on CPAN covering features like database access, authentication, serialization, and logging. The plugin ecosystem is smaller than those of frameworks in more popular languages, reflecting Perl's niche but dedicated web development community. Plugins follow a consistent API defined by the Dancer2 core.