A new year is upon us, and I figured this would be good time to take a look at the improvements in the Mojolicious framework in the last year. There has been a dazzling number of releases, 122 in fact, including the current release, 2.42.
Some of the releases were mere bugfix releases, with nothing noteworthy to add, but I’ll try going through the major releases in the last year. When this year started, we already had a robust MVC Web framework, and through the year you will note that a lot of the work has gone into building a first class real time web framework. 2010 ended with 1.0, codename Snow Flake, released 26th of december 2010. 1.01 fixed a couple of bugs, and added TLS Authentication.
The next major release, code name “Smiling Cat Face With Heart-Shaped Eyes”, was released on 2011-02-14. This release deprecated wildcard route names in favor of automatically generated default names for all routes. There were several new experimental features, including a more Moose-like attribute generator, on_start attribute for Mojo::Client, support for setting the user agent, mode-specific built-in templates to easily add a production error template, and CSS selectors in the ‘get’ command. There were also a new image helper, and support for session cookies.
The next major change was in 1.13, which deprecated the ailing Mojo::Client for a much improved Mojo::UserAgent, which handled async requests in a much more coherent fashion.There were also features added like IPV6 support and the default Fail Raptor added in 1.17 and argument localization in 1.18 before 1.3 which was released the 5th of may1.4.
1.3 was codenamed “Tropical Drink”, and tried to deprecate 5.8 support, 5.8 no longer being supported by the Perl core developers, and having serious security issues. However, due to RedHat users with old Perls, we had to temporarily revert that decision, before finally removing 5.8 support in release 2.0; Mojo::Base was also updated to enable 5.10 features. This release also added an experimental “before_render” hook and exposed the hooks in Lite apps.
1.4, “Smiling Face With Sunglasses”, followed about a month later, 2nd of june, and contained a major update to the Mojo::DOM parser, adding an ‘append’ method, direct hash access for attributes, and child element accessor, as well as collections. The release also added an ‘eval’ command, improved long poll support and started serializing sessions as JSON, which is more efficient than Storable.
Several minor releases followed, including 1.42 allowing status as an argument to render and 1.44 adding Morbo, the fearsome restarting development server. (DOOOM) this release also added an application mount plugin. 1.47 included a new callback condition as well as a host condition for the routes. 1.53 added format support to Mojo::Log and 1.57 dramatically improved Hypnotoad hot restart, allowing you a hot restart just by running Hypnotoad again, as well as adding a —stop parameter.
1.65 changed the IOLoop to be event based, and added support for using the EV event loop, allowing for great performance and compatibility with AnyEvent modules. In 1.69, IOLoop::Trigger allowed grouping non-blocking requests easily, and Mojo::DOM added healing support, allowing it to parse most markup that renders in a browser.
To make Mojolicious more RESTish, 1.73 added the experimental respond_to renderer, as well as type detection. 1.78 added a cpanify command and plugin generator to allow easy plugin writing and sharing. 1.80 normalized the casing of plugins, and 1.82 added a grep method to collections, later joined by ‘first’, ‘reverse,’,shuffle’ and ‘sort’.
Web socket testing was added in 1.86, 1.87 added an app command and a ‘t’ helper, and 1.99 adding group support to Lite apps, as well as binary support for web sockets.
All this as well as several minor features, bugfixes and documentation updates adds up to Mojolicious 2.0, code named “Leaf Fluttering In Wind” which was released 17th of october. It also added slice support to collections and completed the transition from callbacks to events. Web socket support was updated to ietf-17.
2.01 followed two days later, adding upgrade and part events, and 2.03 adding new experimental ietf http status codes. 2.10 added a websocket send_frame method and frame event, 2.19 revised the hook system to use events, and 2.27 was a major streamlining of the core IOLoop, deprecating several methods.
2.29 added chained events from the plugin system, and a new around_dispatch hook. 2.35 added etag support to Mojo Headers, and 2.37 marked the change of Mojolicious to being maintained by a core team, adding me(Marcus Ramberg), Glen Hinkle and Abhijit Menon-Sen to the core. This release also worked around a serious memory leak in Perl itself.
2.39 was released just before the holidays, and updated the user agent to use an ‘error’ event, as well as exposing ‘local_address’ and adding a close method to IOLoop Streams. 2.40 was released on the 24th, adding JSON Pointer support, and finally 2.41 was released on the 28th stabilizing many of the experimental features mentioned above, and allowing session expiry to be turned off.
We now believe the real time part of Mojolicious to be as robust as the MVC part, and expect less frequent releases of the framework in 2012. If you want to learn more about the features in Mojolicious, check out our excellent guides.
Happy New Year, and thanks for 2011.
[All the information in this document was extracted from the Mojo Changelog.]