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.
If you’re a Greasemonkey script author and would like to give it a try, you’ll find some basic usage instructions on the project page and in the 
