I have been looking at Plack for several months now. I always thought it was a cool project, where "cool" means useful, good code, nice documentation, well structured, strong development "flow", etc…

Lately I've been "rebooting" an internal project, doing a lot of infrastructure work like deployment tools, management of different environments like devel, test, staging and production, bug fixing, etc… Regular stuff that you usually already take for granted, but this project didn't have, for many reasons.

After this rebooting work, time has come to add new features to the web-facing part of this project, so new pages and forms. My frustration came from mainly two factors:

• the code being tightly integrated with mod_perl
• the need to change the apache config every time you add a new /something to the application

While the mod_perl integration is not necessarily a bad thing, and mod_perl is a fast and reliable product serving millions of pageviews per day, it's also nice to have code that you can run anywhere, not just on Apache. That might or might not happen, but I'd want to be ready when that's needed. In fact, we're starting to use nginx on some applications, including My Opera

So I decided to invest some time to play with Plack. Plack transposed to Perl concepts from Ruby's Rack and WSGI, a spec born in the Python world I believe.

I'm still at the first experiments with it, but Plack is a great software with a spectacular potential! If you're in doubt, try it for yourself. What made me decide to try Plack was Starman.

Starman is a damn fast PSGI-enabled preforking HTTP web server written in Perl. As soon as I started starman with a stupid simple app.psgi I realized I had to invest some time in it.

A couple of days later I have the slick opera.com design into a bunch of Template Toolkit blocks, with all machinery to make them work for real, and a PSGI application class. From the screenshot you can see this request is loaded in 38 ms, and this my desktop machine, and the Debug middleware gives you useful debugging info through sidebar panels.

I can run this class either as standalone with Starman, or in Apache + mod_perl with Plack::Handler::Apache2 or anything else for that matter, like FastCGI, or even plain CGI if you want that.

And I think that shows:

• how cool the PSGI/WSGI concept is
• that you can really code once, run anywhere, and don't care about the web server stack