Download websites that use Dancer

About Dancer

A web framework only enters a dataset like this one if it agrees to name itself. Everything a server side framework does happens before the response leaves the machine, so the only evidence a crawler can collect is what the framework volunteers, usually a response header, a default error page or a recognisable session cookie. Dancer volunteers a header by default, which is why it can be counted at all, and any deployment behind a proxy that strips headers is simply absent from our view. As of October 2026 we record Dancer on 41 sites, and that figure is a lower bound with an unusually large amount of room underneath it.

The version picture is where the data becomes interesting rather than merely present. We hold 7 distinct versions across the population, and the release we see most often is 1.3521, which belongs to the original line of the framework even though a rewritten successor line has been the maintained one for years. A spread like that is characteristic of software that gets installed for a purpose and then left running, because upgrading a working internal service earns nobody anything. The category we file it under, Web frameworks, is the right one for the same reason: these are processes, not products, and they behave like infrastructure.

What the presence of the framework implies about the organisation behind a site is more useful than the framework itself. Choosing Perl for a web service in 2009 or afterwards generally meant the expertise was already in the building, so a match points at a team with an existing codebase, an operations culture comfortable with long uptimes, and often an internal tool or API that was never meant to be a public destination. The Artistic License licence under which it ships tells you nothing about the customer, but the deployment pattern does.

That combination makes the list valuable to a specific set of readers. Consultancies and recruiters sizing a language community, maintainers judging how much of the installed base is still on an older line before they cut support, and security researchers scoping who would need to act on an advisory all need the whole population at once rather than an answer about one host. A per-domain lookup can confirm a suspicion. Only a full list lets you count what you are dealing with, and only if you read our count as the visible part of a larger installed base.