Learning to Dance

A tutorial at YAPC::EU 2011 on using Dancer.

In this lesson you'll be implementing a website for accessing an airport search engine based on Dancer.

Doing the exercises you'll learn how Dancer is used, and how the code should be structured to make a site easy to change and maintain.

Teacher: Andrew Solomon Teaching Assistants: Adam Taylor, Liz Goldstein

What's Dancer?

Dancer is a micro 'web framework' - a toolkit for developing a dynamic web application. It is inspired by the Ruby framework, Sinatra.

Prerequisites

• Basic Perl knowledge
• Basic HTML/HTTP knowledge

Preparation

• Bring a laptop with Perl installed

• Install Task::Dancer (somewhat large) or install Dancer and Dancer::Template::TemplateToolkit

• Install Data::Types

• Either checkout a copy of this talk git clone git://github.com/andrewsolomon/YAPC2011DancingLesson.git

• Or download and untar/unzip from the 'Downloads' button https://github.com/andrewsolomon/YAPC2011DancingLesson

• Open the slides with your browser: README.www/README.md.html README.www/part1.md.html README.www/part2.md.html

• Check that everything works:

$ cd YAPC2011DancingLesson/solutions/part2/airport-toolkit
$ ./bin/search_airports --matching syd

If it doesn't run, install any prerequisites we forgot!

Instructions

Do your exercises in the directories

YAPC2011DancingLesson/exercises/part1/ex1 
YAPC2011DancingLesson/exercises/part1/ex2
...

and if you get stuck, you'll find solutions in

YAPC2011DancingLesson/solutions/part1/ex1 
YAPC2011DancingLesson/solutions/part1/ex2
...

Paths to take

The lesson is divided into two sections:

• Part 1: https://github.com/andrewsolomon/YAPC2011DancingLesson/blob/master/slides/part1.md

This provides you with the basic toolkit of skills for implementing a web site.

• Part 2: https://github.com/andrewsolomon/YAPC2011DancingLesson/blob/master/slides/part2.md

This is where the interface to the search engine is implemented. If you just want to cut to the chase, you can skip some of the exercises as follows:

(Quick and) Dirty Dancing

• Part 1: Ex 1 - 4, 6, 8
• Part 2: Ex 1 - 4