NAME

MVC::Neaf [ni:f] stands for Not Even A Framework.

OVERVIEW

Neaf offers a simple, yet powerful way to create simple web-applications. By the lazy, for the lazy.

It has a lot of similarities to Dancer and Kelp.

Model is assumed to be a regular Perl module, and is totally out of scope.

View is assumed to have just one method, render(), which receives a hashref and returns a pair of (content, content-type).

Controller is reduced to just one function, which gets a request object and is expected to return a hashref.

A pre-defined set of dash-prefixed control keys allows to control the framework's behaviour while all other keys are just sent to the view.

Request object will depend on the underlying web-server. The same app, verbatim, should be able to run as PSGI app, CGI script, or Apache handler. Request knows all you need to know about the outside world.

EXAMPLE

The following would produce a greeting message depending on the ?name= parameter.

use strict;
use warnings;
use MVC::Neaf qw(:sugar);

get + post "/" => sub {
    my $req = shift;

    return {
        -template => \'Hello, [% name %]!',
        -type     => 'text/plain',
        name      => $req->param( name => qr/\w+/, "Stranger" ),
    },
};

neaf->run;

FEATURES

• GET, POST, and HEAD requests; uploads; redirects; and cookies are supported. Not quite impressive, but it's 95% of what's needed 95% of the time.

• Template::Toolkit view out of the box;

• json/jsonp view out of the box (with sanitized callbacks);

• can serve raw content (e.g. generated images);

• can serve static files. No need for separate web server to test your CSS/images.

• sanitized query parameters and cookies out of the box.

• Easy to develop RESTful web-services.

NOT SO BORING FEATURES

• Fine-grained hooks and path-based default values;

• Delayed and/or unspecified length replies supported;

• Form validation with resubmission ability. Validator::LIVR supported, but not requires.

• CLI-based debugging via perl <your_app.pl> --help|--list|--method GET

• Sessions supported out of the box with cookie-based and SQL-based backends.

• Fancy error templates supported.

MORE EXAMPLES

See example.

Neaf uses examples as an additional test suite.

No feature is considered complete until half a page code snipped is written to demonstrate it.

PHILOSOPHY

• Start out simple, then grow up.

• Data in, data out. A function should receive and argument and return a value or die.

• Sane defaults. Everything can be configured, nothing needs to be.

• It's not software unless you can run it.

• Trust nobody. Validate the data.

• Force UTF8 where possible. It's 21st century.

BUGS

This package is still under heavy development (with a test coverage of about 80% though).

Use github or CPAN RT to report bugs and propose features.

Bug reports, feature requests, and overall critique are welcome.

CONTRIBUTING TO THIS PROJECT

Please see STYLE.md for the style guide.

Please see CHECKLIST if you plan to release a version.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Eugene Ponizovsky had great influence over my understanding of MVC.

Alexander Kuklev gave some great early feedback and also drove me towards functional programming and pure functions.

Akzhan Abdulin tricked me into making the hooks.

Cono made some early feedback and great feature proposals.

Ideas were shamelessly stolen from PSGI, Dancer, and Catalyst.

The CGI module was used heavily in the beginning of the project.

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2016-2017 Konstantin S. Uvarin aka KHEDIN

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.