Notice anything different about my site? No? Good, this means that the transition went smooth. I rewrote the engine that my website runs on from Symfony to Perl Dancer.
You might remember that I introduced the Symfony-based engine less than six months ago, so why the switch? Well, back when I launched it, I kind of felt that it might not last very long — mostly because Symfony was just a better-than-nothing choice. For years, my website was running on an ugly framework-wannabe solution that I developed myself. By the way, if you ever get the same idea, consider this advice:
(source: gojko.net)
By the time I finally decided to rebuild it, Symfony just happened to be around — I had a Symfony project coming up and thought it might be good to first get familiar with the framework on a smaller task. I started working on the rewrite, and I quickly got the feeling that Symfony is just too big for the purpose of running a small website like this — I only needed a tiny subset of its numerous features. All in all, it felt way too heavy. But, I really wanted to replace the old engine, so I still went with it.
As for Dancer, I first heard of it about a year ago and I knew I was going to give it a try at some point. Why? Two reasons:
- It’s a micro framework, which is much better suited for simple sites than a full-blown MVC framework
- It’s Perl, dammit!
So, two weekends of enjoyable hacking, and here it is — my website running on Perl. More precisely, it’s a Perl/PHP hybrid, as the blog is still powered by WordPress. But, the blog engine is feeding its output to the Dancer application, so everything you see is processed by Perl.