Mojolicious::Guides::CodingGuidelines(3p)

NAME
Mojolicious::Guides::CodingGuidelines - Coding guidelines

OVERVIEW
This document describes the coding guidelines that are the foundations of Mojo and Mojolicious development.

Please do not send patches unless you agree with them.

MISSION STATEMENT
Mojo is a runtime environment for Perl real-time web frameworks. It provides all the basic tools and helpers needed to write simple web applications and higher level web frameworks such as Mojolicious.

All components should be reusable in other projects and in a UNIXish way only loosely coupled.

Especially for people new to Perl it should be as easy as possible to install Mojolicious and get started. Writing web applications can be one of the most fun ways to learn a language!

For developers of other web frameworks it should be possible to reuse all the infrastructure and just consider the higher levels of the Mojolicious distribution an example application.

RULES
    Web development should be easy and fun, this is what we optimize for.

    The web is a moving target, to stay relevant we have to stay in motion too.

    Keep it simple, no magic unless absolutely necessary.

    The installation process should be as fast and painless as possible. (Less than a minute on most common hardware is a good rule of thumb)

    Code should be written with a Perl6 port in mind.

    The addition and modification of features is decided by majority vote or the pumpking.

    Any core developer may nominate a new one, who must then be accepted by a 2/3 majority vote.

    The pumpking has veto rights and may select his successor.

    It's not a feature without a test and documentation.

    A feature is only needed when the majority of the userbase benefits from it.

    Features may only be changed in a major release or after being deprecated for at least 3 months.

    Refactoring and deprecations should be avoided if no important feature depends on it.

    New features can be marked as experimental to be excluded from deprecation policies.

    A major release is signaled by a new major version number and a unique code name based on a unicode character.

    Only add prereqs if absolutely necessary and make them optional if possible.

    Domain specific languages should be avoided in favor of Perl'ish solutions.

    No inline POD.

    Documentation belongs to the guides, module POD is just an API reference.

    The main focus of the included documentation should be on examples, no walls of text. (An example for every one or two sentences is a good rule of thumb)

    Everything should be ordered alphabetically if possible.

    The master source code repository should always be kept in a stable state, use feature branches for actual development.

    Lines should not be longer than 78 characters and we indent with 2 whitespaces.

    Code should be run through Perl::Tidy with the included ".perltidyrc".

    No spaghetti code.

    Code should be organized in blocks and those blocks should be commented.

    Comments should be correctly capitalized, and funny if possible, punctuation is optional if it doesn't increase readability.

    Every file should contain at least one quote from "The Simpsons" or "Futurama".

    No names outside of "Mojolicious.pm".

    No Elitism.

    Peace!

MORE
You can continue with Mojolicious::Guides now or take a look at the Mojolicious wiki <http://github.com/kraih/mojo/wiki>, which contains a lot more documentation and examples by many different authors.