Tweetylicious - a Twitter-like microblogging app in just one file!

So, I've been playing a little with Mojolicious::Lite, and here's what I came up with :-)

Tweetylicious is a small - but rather complete - microblogging web application in a single file! It is meant to demonstrate how easy and fun it is to create your own Web applications using modern Perl 5 and jQuery!

Some features:

• Multi-user, with homepages, search and list of followers/following
• Nice, clean, pretty interface (at least I think so :P)
• User avatar images provided by gravatar
• Unicode support
• Well structured, commented code, easy to expand and customize
• Encrypted online sessions
• Uses an actual database (SQLite) and stores encrypted user password

If you want it, the full code is in github. Removing just blank lines and comments, the Model has ~80 lines, the Controller ~110 lines, templates ~170 lines, plus ~90 lines of static css and ~60 of static javascript. And that's the whole app :D

How do you run it?

perl tweetylicious.pl daemon

You'll need Mojolicious and ORLite - two very lightweight modules - to run the app, and that's about it! A live Internet connection is also good, since it fetches jQuery on the fly.

Mind you, it's far from perfect (bug reports and patches always welcome!). I wrote it as a demo to show the kind of stuff you can quickly achieve with Perl. It's totally usable and might be a good fit for quick deployment and customization on internal networks, but if you're looking for a business ready microblogging solution, you might want to look at status.net (which powers identi.ca). But it's waaaay bigger ;-P

Tutorial...ish

I tried making the commits linear and modular, so newcomers can take a look at git log for a "tutorial":

1. initial commit - diff, full file
2. adding index page (and route) - diff, full file
3. separating common html into a shareable 'layout' - diff, full file
4. adding (all) css - sorry, this is not a css tutorial :P - diff, full file
5. users will need to 'login' and 'join' (register)! - diff, full file
6. first jQuery contact: turning links into buttons - diff, full file
7. creating the 'User' model schema in our database - diff, full file
8. registering users: the template - diff, full file
9. registering users: the controller - diff, full file
10. registering users: validating registration data - diff, full file
11. registering users: prevent usernames that are part of a route - diff, full file
12. user login: the template (and basic route) - diff, full file
13. user login: the controller (handling form submission) - diff, full file
14. user logout: controller, and option in template - diff, full file
15. the user's homepage (template) - diff, full file
16. the user's homepage (controller) - diff, full file
17. adding a 'not found' page - diff, full file
18. making 'login' and 'join' redirect to user's homepage - diff, full file
19. updating our model: posts! - diff, full file
20. making user's homepage show posts (but user can't create them just yet - diff, full file
21. updating our controller: creating posts - diff, full file
22. updating our controller: deleting posts - diff, full file
23. updating our controller: turning common posting auth code into a ladder - diff, full file
24. more jQuery: styling post submit into a button too - diff, full file
25. more jQuery: showing how many characters are left in a post - diff, full file
26. more jQuery: highlighting posts on hover - diff, full file
27. more jQuery: formatting our content for RTs (@user) - diff, full file
28. creating posts via Ajax (rather, Ajaj, since we're using JSON ;) - diff, full file
29. deleting posts via Ajax (rather, Ajaj, since we're using JSON ;) - diff, full file
30. searching posts: search form template - diff, full file
31. searching posts: jQuery effects - diff, full file
32. searching posts: model - diff, full file
33. searching posts: controller - diff, full file
34. searching posts: results template - diff, full file
35. searching posts: jQuery (naive) formatting for topics (#topic) - diff, full file
36. followers and following: the model - diff, full file
37. followers and following: the controller - diff, full file
38. followers and following: template changes - diff, full file

Newer commits will likely be not as organized, and mostly bugfixing, but this should get people going - hopefully :P

Well, that's it. Have fun!