Gabor Szabo

Posted on Mar 16 • Originally published at perlweekly.com

Perl 🐪 Weekly #764 - Dancer to Desktop with Prima

#perl #news #programming

Originally published at Perl Weekly 764

Hi there,

The Perl community continues to move forward with exciting updates and useful new tools. Recently, a new release of Dancer has been announced. In his blog post, Jason A. Crome shared the release of Dancer 2.10, bringing improvements and fixes to the popular web framework. Dancer has long been appreciated for making web development in Perl simple and expressive, and this new version continues that tradition. It is always encouraging to see mature Perl frameworks still actively maintained and evolving with the needs of developers.

Another interesting project worth exploring is Prima, introduced by Reinier Maliepaard. Prima is a powerful GUI toolkit for Perl, allowing developers to build graphical desktop applications. Many Perl developers are familiar with web or command-line tools, but Prima reminds us that Perl can also be used effectively for desktop interfaces. The project demonstrates how flexible the language can be when building different kinds of applications.

The Perl Steering Council also published a new UPDATE: PSC (217) | 2026-03-09. These regular updates give a useful overview of what is happening around the Perl core and governance. They help the community stay informed about ongoing discussions, development priorities, and future plans. Transparency like this is very valuable for an open source language, as it helps everyone understand how decisions are made and where the project is heading.

Finally, it is always nice to see new modules appearing in the CPAN ecosystem. Recently I released a small module called DBIx::Class::MockData, which is designed to help generate mock data when working with DBIx::Class in tests. Creating realistic data for database tests can sometimes take extra effort, so tools that simplify this process can be quite helpful. As always, CPAN continues to grow thanks to contributions from many developers in the Perl community.

Enjoy rest of the newsletter. Stay safe and healthy.

--
Your editor: Mohammad Sajid Anwar.

Announcements

Dancer 2.1.0 Released

In this short announcement, Jason A. Crome shares the release of Dancer 2.10, a new version of the popular Perl web framework Dancer. The post is brief and to the point, informing the community that the new version is now available on CPAN and ready for use. It highlights the continued maintenance and progress of the framework, which has long been valued for making web development in Perl simple and enjoyable.

Articles

This week in PSC (217) | 2026-03-09

The Perl Steering Council shares a short summary of their latest meeting and the topics currently on their radar. The meeting itself was brief, but it still covered a few important administrative and planning items related to the Perl core project. One of the main points discussed was the ongoing outreach to potential new members of the Perl core team. The council mentioned that they have contacted several people and are waiting for responses before holding a vote. Expanding or refreshing the group of contributors is an important step in keeping the Perl core development active and sustainable.

Mastering Perl Prima: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

The article explains that Prima provides a rich set of widgets and tools for creating graphical interfaces such as windows, buttons, and other interactive elements. With relatively small pieces of code, developers can create a working GUI application and run it through Prima's event loop. This makes it possible to build desktop programs in Perl without relying only on command-line interfaces or web frameworks.

Beautiful Perl feature : two-sided constructs, in list or in scalar context

In this article, Laurent Dami explores an interesting Perl concept: two-sided constructs that behave differently depending on list or scalar context. The post explains how certain Perl expressions can adapt their behavior based on what the surrounding code expects, which is one of the language's distinctive and powerful features.

CPAN

Mail::Make

Mail::Make is a modern Perl module for building and sending MIME email messages with a clean, fluent API. It allows developers to construct messages step-by-step (adding headers, text, HTML, attachments, etc.) while automatically generating the correct MIME structure for the email.

DBIx::Class::MockData

The CPAN distribution DBIx-Class-MockData introduces a convenient way to generate mock data for testing applications built with DBIx::Class. It helps developers quickly populate schemas with realistic test records, making it easier to write and maintain database tests. Tools like this are particularly useful in projects using DBIx::Class, which maps relational database tables to Perl objects and is widely used in Perl web applications.

The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge by Mohammad Sajid Anwar will help you step out of your comfort-zone. You can even win prize money of $50 by participating in the weekly challenge. We pick one champion at the end of the month from among all of the contributors during the month, thanks to the sponsor Marc Perry.

The Weekly Challenge - 365

Welcome to a new week with a couple of fun tasks "Alphabet Index Digit Sum" and "Valid Token Counter". If you are new to the weekly challenge then why not join us and have fun every week. For more information, please read the FAQ.

RECAP - The Weekly Challenge - 364

Enjoy a quick recap of last week's contributions by Team PWC dealing with the "Decrypt String" and "Goal Parser" tasks in Perl and Raku. You will find plenty of solutions to keep you busy.

String Goal

The post showing effective use of features like gather/take and thoughtful string tokenization. The post combines readable code with solid explanation, making it useful and inspiring for anyone exploring Raku for text parsing tasks.

Perl Weekly Challenge: Week 364

The post provides a clear and well-structured walkthrough of Perl Weekly Challenge #364, presenting the problem statements alongside thoughtful explanations of the approach and implementation. The solutions are concise, readable, and demonstrate practical Perl/Raku techniques, making the article both informative and enjoyable for developers following the challenge.

Alternate Codes

This post presents solutions to Perl Weekly Challenge 364, with a strong focus on clear reasoning and elegant Perl implementations. The article walks through the logic behind each task and explains the approach in a concise but technical way, making it easy for readers to follow the thought process. It is a well-written challenge write-up that nicely demonstrates practical problem solving and expressive Perl code.

substituting strings!

The article offers a practical and technically rich walkthrough of the challenge tasks. The explanations are concise but clear, and the multiple implementations make the post especially interesting for readers who enjoy comparing solutions across languages and environments.

Perl Weekly Challenge 364

In this blog post, W. Luis Mochán shares his solutions to Perl Weekly Challenge 364, presenting concise and well-thought-out Perl implementations for both tasks. The article focuses on clear logic and often explores compact solutions, sometimes even demonstrating elegant one-liners and efficient use of Perl features.

Decrypted "715#15#15#112#": goooal!

The solutions demonstrate a thoughtful and elegant approach to Perl Weekly Challenge #364, combining clear reasoning with expressive Perl idioms. The code is concise yet readable, showing creative problem-solving and effective use of Perl's strengths to produce clean and well-structured implementations.

Andrés Cantor Goes West

The write-up balances technical detail with an informal and engaging style, making the reasoning behind the solutions easy to follow. It is an enjoyable and well-explained challenge post that highlights practical problem solving and thoughtful coding.

Weird encodings

This post shares Peter's solutions to Perl Weekly Challenge 364, presenting clear and well-structured Perl implementations for both tasks. It explains the reasoning behind the approach and walks the reader through the logic step by step, making the solutions easy to follow. Overall, it is a solid and educational write-up that demonstrates practical Perl problem-solving and clean coding style.

The Weekly Challenge - 364: Decrypt String

This post presents a clear and well-structured solution to one of the Perl Weekly Challenge tasks. Reinier explains the approach step by step and supports it with concise Perl code, making the logic easy to follow for readers interested in algorithmic problem solving. It is a solid technical walkthrough that demonstrates practical Perl usage while keeping the explanation accessible and educational.

The Weekly Challenge - 364: Goal Parser

This post presents a thoughtful solution to the second task of Perl Weekly Challenge 364, with a clear explanation of the algorithm and the reasoning behind it. Reinier walks through the logic step by step and supports it with concise Perl code, making the approach easy to understand. It is a well-written technical note that demonstrates practical problem solving and highlights Perl's strengths for implementing compact and readable solutions.

The Weekly Challenge #364

In this post, Robbie shares his Perl solutions for Perl Weekly Challenge 364, continuing his detailed and methodical style of writing about the weekly tasks. His solutions are well structured and focus on correctness and clarity, with carefully organised code and explanations that help readers understand the reasoning behind each step.

Decrypted Goals

In this post, Roger presents his solutions to Perl Weekly Challenge 364, focusing on the task involving "decrypted goals". The write-up explains the reasoning behind the algorithm and walks through a clear Perl implementation that solves the problem efficiently. It is a concise and technically solid article that demonstrates careful analysis and practical Perl problem-solving.

It's all about the translation

In this blog post, Simon shares his solutions to another Perl Weekly Challenge, following his usual workflow of first solving the tasks in Python and then translating the logic into Perl. This approach provides an interesting comparison between the two languages and highlights how similar algorithms can be implemented in different ways.

Rakudo

2026.10 Climbing CragCLI

Weekly collections

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Great CPAN modules released last week;
MetaCPAN weekly report;
StackOverflow Perl report.

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