Mojolicious Boilerplate Evolution

A while back I wrote about the awesomeness of Mojolicious with Bootstrap from Twitter.

I was then introducing the Mojolicious Boilerplate - a light github repository which is meant to give a head start to any Perl developer who wants to create modern, shiny, good looking (Bootstrap) web apps in simple, logical, easy to learn and really, really fast manner (Mojolicious).

I didn't knew if other Perl developers will share my enthusiasm regarding this combination, but it seems that you  did. I think that the most important factor that helped this idea to get traction is the fact that Gabor Szabo also considered this combination (Mojolicious + Bootstrap)  as one with good potential, so my introductory article got published in the issue 34 of Perl Weekly Newsletter.

There are now 2 months since I first added code to the repository and the statistics are:

• 33 people are watching the repository
• 5 of them forked it
• 2 contributors (they both sent patches this week, thank you Tudor Crisan and Christian Sturm for helping)

As I said earlier, I wanted this repository to be just a starting point for web application development, but it seems that now it's also used as a starting point for learning new technologies like Behavior Driven Development with Perl, Mojolicious, Bootstrap and (not quite bleeding edge, but very useful) working with github and deploying on dotCloud (I'll write about this soon).

Since it started, some new and shiny features were added to the Boilerplate:

• configurable application menu
• easy ways to send custom notifications to the UI from the application 
• examples of working with sessions
• example of testing with BDD (tests which are working now thanks to the patch sent by Tudor Crisan)
• configurable google analytics tracking code
• a velociraptor as the .ico image (one of the features I like most)

The main vision for the Mojolicious Boilerplate is to keep it as simple and as light as possible while adding as many general purpose features as possible. 

If you reached this far reading this article, please consider giving your feedback on the following:

• How would you want to see the Boilerplate evolving?
• What do you consider as a must have for the Boilerplate and what do you want as nice to have ?

The things I want to do next in order to make the Boilerplate as usable as possible are:

• Add more documentation
• Split the already existing documentation in pages/sections
• Integrate this documentation in the Boilerplate itself in order to let the developer get the docs upfront when he/she clones/forks the repo
• Document the deployment on dotCloud process
• create a Mojolicious application generator that will generate a reduced form of the boilerplate
• create Mojolicious generators for resources (based on some DBIx::Class models or something)
• many many more that I don't remember right now

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