Rapi::Blog talk and live demo presented at The Perl Conference 2017 in Washington, DC on June 20th.

Talk Abstract

For this year's talk I'll be demoing the brand new RapidApp-based blogging platform Rapi::Blog which has been under development for around 6 months so far (as of march). It will be debuting with its first public release on CPAN on the day of the talk! Folks, this is conference-driven development at its finest.

Previous years' RapidApp talks have also involved day-of, first-time releases of demo applications, but this year is different in that Rapi::Blog is first and foremost a real application and is designed for real-world use.

Another blog?!?? Yep. And, like the countless other devs that came before me - who broke-down and said "screw it, I'll just write my own blog" - I went down the rabbit hole because I wanted some set of features and functionality that I couldn't find in other platforms. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, the two main factors were:

1. Truer abstraction and separation between the front-end "theme" and the backend
2. Leveraging the features and flexibility of RapidApp

Rapi::Blog introduces a new "scaffold" pattern which consists of a file structure of template-driven, pure HTML/CSS documents that are able to represent the view and layout for a given site using a straightforward but comprehensive API of template directives. The intent is to reduce the translation effort needed to convert a static, font-end only html site (such as a bootstrap site/template) to be driven from dynamic, backend models. The blog pattern emerges from a content model (i.e. posts, comments, etc, standard blog features) and a scaffold of html templates, css and images which accesses it.

Since it's powered by RapidApp, the initialization of the storage model is all automatic and requires virtually nothing for a new site/instance (unless you want to customize the model, which you can). In this way, a Rapi::Blog installation is able to consist of nothing but a scaffold and a place to store data. It is then the scaffold that can be extended, customized and adapted to create all kinds layouts, designs and scenarios. That said, Rapi::Blog will also ship with a fully-working vanilla-design scaffold needed to function as a blog.

If you want to try another blog with maximalist features but minimalist effort, or, if you just want to see my/RapidApp's take on the blog question, this talk is for you. Just like previous RapidApp talks, this one will consist of all live-running, real-time demos (which you can run yourself), and should be a lot of fun.

Slides used in the video: