I recently had a conversation with the lovely @LukeOCodes about the struggles I’m facing with my current projects at work. I maintain a legacy Perl monolith, using [HTMLMason](https://metacpan.org/pod/HTMLMason), which essentially embeds Perl similar to PHP3. Embedded code in templates, no built in methods for MVC control flow, and testing very difficult.
Luke mentioned the idea of creating an API, and layering a new view layer on top. Unfortunately, an IE dependency precludes using a modern Javascript frontend such as React or Vue.
However, there is more than one way to create an API. Some API’s are over the web, while others are internal to an app. I’m currently exploring Perl web frameworks which can use the existing API for backend logic, and move the frontend logic from templates into controllers and Plain Old Perl Objects (POPO’s?, that doesn’t sound right).
At the moment I’m exploring Mojolicious, an all-inclusive micro-framework, similar to Sinatra or Express. How micro?
use Mojolicious::Lite;
get '/' => {text => 'I ♥ Mojolicious!'};
app->start;
Pretty minimal, right? This does hide a lot of complexity, however. Mojolicious has allowances to implement MVC, dumb templates, plugins, middleware, sessions, and has allowances to make testing easier. So far, each hurdle I expected to be difficult has fallen like dominoes. The hardest part so far has been the convoluted business logic. Not something a framework can usually fix. 🙃
I’ll be sure to check back as I dig deeper and come to a conclusion.