Back in the early days of the web, many people learned Perl because of a wonderful Perl library called CGI. It was simple enough to get started without knowing much about the language and powerful enough to keep you going, learning by doing was much fun. While most of the techniques used are outdated now, the idea behind it is not. Mojolicious is a new attempt at implementing this idea using state of the art technology.

Features

• An amazing real-time web framework supporting a simplified single file mode through Mojolicious::Lite.

  Powerful out of the box with RESTful routes, plugins, Perl-ish templates, session management, signed cookies, testing framework, static file server, I18N, first class unicode support and much more for you to discover.

• Very clean, portable and Object Oriented pure Perl API without any hidden magic and no requirements besides Perl 5.10.1 (although 5.12+ is recommended, and optional CPAN modules will be used to provide advanced functionality if they are installed).

• Full stack HTTP 1.1 and WebSocket client/server implementation with IPv6, TLS, Bonjour, IDNA, Comet (long polling), chunking and multipart support.

• Built-in non-blocking I/O web server supporting libev and hot deployment, perfect for embedding.

• Automatic CGI and PSGI detection.

• JSON and HTML5/XML parser with CSS3 selector support.

• Fresh code based upon years of experience developing Catalyst.

Installation

All you need is a oneliner, it takes less than a minute.

$ sudo sh -c "curl -L cpanmin.us | perl - Mojolicious"

Getting Started

These three lines are a whole web application.

use Mojolicious::Lite;

get '/' => {text => 'Hello World!'};

app->start;

To run this example with the built-in development web server just put the code into a file and start it with morbo.

$ morbo hello.pl
Server available at http://127.0.0.1:3000.

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/
Hello World!

Duct tape for the HTML5 web

Web development for humans, making hard things possible and everything fun.

use Mojolicious::Lite;

# Simple plain text response
get '/' => {text => 'Hello World!'};

# Route associating "/time" with template in DATA section
get '/time' => 'clock';

# RESTful web service with JSON and text representation
get '/list/:offset' => sub {
  my $self    = shift;
  my $numbers = [0 .. $self->param('offset')];
  $self->respond_to(
    json => {json => $numbers},
    txt  => {text => join(',', @$numbers)}
  );
};

# Scrape information from remote sites
post '/title' => sub {
  my $self = shift;
  my $url  = $self->param('url') || 'http://mojolicio.us';
  $self->render_text(
    $self->ua->get($url)->res->dom->html->head->title->text);
};

# WebSocket echo service
websocket '/echo' => sub {
  my $self = shift;
  $self->on(message => sub {
    my ($self, $message) = @_;
    $self->send_message("echo: $message");
  });
};

app->start;
__DATA__

@@ clock.html.ep
% use Time::Piece;
% my $now = localtime;
The time is <%= $now->hms %>.

Single file prototypes like this one can easily grow into well-structured applications.

Want to know more?

Take a look at our excellent documentation at http://mojolicio.us/perldoc!