2009Q1 Grant Proposal: Web.pm - a lightweight web framework for Perl 6

Names:

Ilya Belikin, Carl Mäsak, Stephen Weeks

Email:

Ilya Belikin ([hidden email]), Carl Mäsak ([hidden email]), Stephen Weeks ([hidden email])

Amount Requested:

$3000.

Ilya: 1320$, for 12h/week.

Carl: 1100$, for 10h/week.

Stephen: 550$, for 5h/week.

Synopsis

Two years ago, Juerd proposed the Web.pm module for Perl 6. Meant to functionally replace Perl 5's CGI.pm, it is a revamping of the fundamentals in order to better serve today's web development needs.

Apart from implementing a working web development toolkit, we intend to integrate templating as a desirable default, make sessions and sticky form values (as described in Juerd's email) work, and organize the framework according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and the REST architecture.

The structure of the Web framework will be modular, and a web application writer can choose the parts that make sense for the particular application developed. As the user's application matures, more high-level modules can be swapped in to combat the increasing complexity.

We intend to develop Web.pm in the open, seeking frequent input from people on #perl6 and #parrot, and from the mailing lists perl6-compiler, perl6-users and perl6-language.

Benefits to the Perl Community

Having a simple, well thought-out web development toolkit can be an enormous benefit to Perl 6 and its growing developer community. There is good opportunity at this time to coordinate an effort to create such a toolkit. A web toolkit will increase Rakudo visibility, and bring more people to try Perl 6 programming.

Applications like November show that it is possible to create a Perl 6 web application today, but that much convenience functionality has to be reinvented in the web application itself. The fact that a bridge between Rakudo and Perl 5/CPAN does not exist at this point is an obstacle, but also an opportunity to sit down and think about the parts that we want to improve or remake rather than just inherit.

As the past six months of November clearly show, development of real-world applications is one of the most effective ways to generate feedback to the Rakudo development team, and to help focus on bug fixes and features needed for everyday tasks.

Deliverables

HTTP::Request, HTTP::Response and Web.pm modules that run on the latest release of Rakudo.

A URI module based on RFC 3986, using Perl 6 grammars.

Web::Tags module for (X)HTML tags generation.

Dispatcher and Routines (with REST support) modules for better controllers code organization.

A simple Perl6-ish templater as a replacement for HTML::Template.

A slightly more advanced XML-aware templating system, similar to Python's Genshi.

Three web applications that make use of the Web module. (On the assumption that having three clients to an API gives enough clues about the different needs clients might have.) The first web application will most likely be November, the wiki, and the second Maya, a blogging engine. The third will be a proof-of-concept pastebin for Perl 6 code with color coding.

A tutorial clearly showing the strengths of the Web module framework, why/when it should be used, and how to get started using it.

The modules URI, HTML::Template, and Dispatcher already exist in a working alpha state within the November repository, and are being u