[dancer-users] First day of the Perl Dancer Conference

[Stefan Hornburg (Racke)]

The first day of the Perl Dancer conference summed up by Gert van der Spoel:

Day one of the Perl Dancer conference has come to an end. A long day with a
many great talks, good food and beer!

The conference room at Schani hotel was packed when Stefan (racke) kicked
off the conference with a short welcome, after which Sawyer X gave an
inspiring talk about the current state of Dancer 2. Very good statistics
show that there is an active user base not afraid to create pull requests
and fork the project. Further good news about a couple of new features
brought the conference to a positive start.

Next up, Thomas Klausner added a game to his talk, where each received a
'bingo' card with terms used in his talk about OAuth2, API's and
Microservices. It didn't take long before the win was claimed with a loud
'Bullshit!' as tradition prescribes. The talk focused on the mess that large
system can become and provided some real life examples on how things could
be alleviated.

Peter Rabbitson took the audience on a journey through DBIx::Class. While
the resulting SQL queries were growing more complex by the minute, the
actual Perl code needed to create these queries kept being readable. The
advice that existing applications could gradually integrate DBIx::Class,
without the need to rewrite complete applications, was met with positive
responses.

Last before lunch, Andrew Beverly from Ctrl-O gave a hands-on demonstration
of the use of Plugin::Auth::Extensible. Using the DBIC provider, he quickly
whipped up user authentication and roles based authorization. A plugin of
value for Perl projects in need of any kind of authentication.

After a, slightly longer than expected, lunch break, Mickey Nasriachi from
booking.com introduced the audience to PONAPI. PONAPI is a Perl
implementation of the JSON-API spec which enables developers to build
REST-API based projects without the redundant discussion about the exchange
of information between clients and servers. That lunch had made the group
sharp and full of attention was shown through some quite good questions
about the handling of sorting and limiting resultsets.

Next Gert van der Spoel took the stage, picking up the OAuth2 baton from
Thomas, but going more in depth with regard to implementation and
implications for use of Social Logins in ecommerce environments. Especially
for the conference he wrote extensions to Dancer and Dancer2 Oauth plugins
to work with the wyngle.com Social Login provider.

Šimun Kodžoman brought the attention to Meteor, an environment for building
modern web applications in pure JavaScript, and Materialize, a modern
responsive front-end framework which, combined with a Dancer backend,
resulted in a state of the art mobile application. In his talk he explained
the reasons for the choices made for the combination of
Materialize-Meteor-Dancer and it now will need to prove itself in a
production environment.

The final talk of the day came from one of the long distance travelers to
the conference, Sam Batschelet. Starting with some simple, descriptive
slides about containers, he shocked the audience with the schematics of a
SpaceCamps setup. But after going into each part of the ecosystem, he
managed to bring the shock level to acceptable heights. He showed he had
done his research and was well prepared answering each question that
followed his talk.

The official part of the first conference day concluded with a panel
discussion. A panel consisting of Dancer(2) core developers Russell Jenkins,
Mickey Nasriachi, Alexis Sukrieh, Sawyer X and Stefan Hornburg sat down and
had the attendees fire off questions and remarks about various topics
related to Dancer 2. Within an hour after the panel discussion the first
results were checked into feature branches of Dancer 2 forks, a clear sign
that putting the brilliant minds of Dancer(2) together in one place is worth
it!

After the fruitful first conference day, a large group of conference
attendees met up at Deewan to enjoy some good Pakistani food, complemented
with big, cool beers, brushing up the vocal chords for conversations,
discussions and fun until the late hours.

-- 
Perl and Dancer Development

Visit our Perl::Dancer conference 2015.
More information on https://www.perl.dance.