Announcing Trickster: A Modern Minimalist Web Framework in Perl

[isaac_caldwell]

Trickster is a modern, lightweight Perl web framework designed to offer a clean developer experience without the heaviness of larger frameworks. Unlike Mojolicious, which is full-stack, and Dancer, which aims for minimalism, Trickster focuses on practical essentials with secure, production-ready defaults.

What makes Trickster different:

• Modern architecture: Stateless, signed-cookie sessions and a clean PSGI-native core make it easy to scale and deploy.

• Security-first design: Built-in validation, secure cookies, and CORS support are enabled out of the box.

• Developer-friendly CLI: Includes project scaffolding, generators, and a hot-reload development server—features often found in frameworks like Rails or Express.

• Balanced approach: Trickster offers more structure and tooling than Dancer while remaining lighter and more PSGI-focused than Mojolicious.

The framework is still young, and I would greatly appreciate feedback from the Perl community. I’m actively looking for reviews, suggestions, and real-world impressions to help shape its next steps.

GitHub: https://github.com/tricksterperl/trickster.git