NAME

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

OVERVIEW

Neaf offers very simple rules to build very simple applications. For the lazy, by 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.

FOUNDATIONS

• Start out simple, then scale up.

• Enough magic already. Use simple constructs where possible.

• Zeroconf: everything can be configured, nothing needs to.

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

• Trust nobody. Validate the data.

• Force UTF8 if possible. It's 21st century already.

EXAMPLE

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

use strict;
use warnings;
use MVC::Neaf;

MVC::Neaf->route( "/" => sub {
	my $req = shift;

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

MVC::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.

NOT SO BORING FEATURES

• CLI-based debugging via perl -MMVC::Neaf::CLI <your_app.pl>

• Can gather performance statistics if needed;

• Delayed and/or unspecified length replies supported;

• Cookie-based sessions supported out of the box. Session backends have to be written yet, though.

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

• Fancy error templates supported.

EXAMPLES

The example/ directory has an app explaining HTTP in a nutshell, jsonp app and some 200-line wiki engine.

BUGS

Lots of them. Still under heavy development.

• mod_perl handler is a mess (but it works somehow);

• no session storage mechanisms supported out of the box;

Patches and proposals are welcome.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Eugene Ponizovsky aka IPH had great influence over my understanding of MVC.

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

CONTRIBUTING TO THE PROJECT

• Version is just a real number x.yyzz (x=major, y=minor, z=patch) Please increase patch number when you commit to muster.

• Indentation is 4 spaces.

• Try to make sure tests pass w/o warnings.

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2016 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.