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the only changes to the web site come from sources that you control
(including the database) and that are accessible in your development
environment.

Using a web framework like L<Dancer> (or any other) for a static web
site is very useful, because it lets you use all the features of the
framework on that site. Think of it as I<extreme caching>.

A possible dataflow would be processing forms on your development server
(maybe to update a local database), then I<publish> as static pages
a I<subset> of all the URLs the application supports.

Turning that application into a real static site (a set of pages
to upload to a static web server) is just a matter of generating all
possible URLs for the static site and saving the corresponding pages to files.

B<wallflower> does just that. It reads a list of URLs, strips off
any query strings, issues HTTP C<GET> requests for each in turn and
saves the response body to a file with a name derived from the request
pathinfo, under the directory specified by the B<--destination> option.

Note that B<wallflower> is not meant for use as an offline browsing tool:
among other things, it doesn't rewrite link URLs to match the pathnames of
the saved pages.

=head1 EXAMPLE

The web site created by C<dancer -a mywebapp> is the perfect example.

The complete list of URLs needed to view the site is:

    /
    /404.html
    /500.html
    /css/error.css
    /css/style.css
    /favicon.ico
    /images/perldancer-bg.jpg
    /images/perldancer.jpg
    /javascripts/jquery.js

Passing this list to B<wallflower> gives the following result:

    $ wallflower -a bin/app.pl -d /tmp -F urls.txt
    200 / => /tmp/output/index.html [5367]
    200 /404.html => /tmp/output/404.html [499]
    200 /500.html => /tmp/output/500.html [510]
    200 /css/error.css => /tmp/output/css/error.css [1210]
    200 /css/style.css => /tmp/output/css/style.css [2850]
    404 /favicon.ico
    404 /images/perldancer-bg.jpg
    404 /images/perldancer.jpg
    200 /javascripts/jquery.js => /tmp/output/javascripts/jquery.js [248235]

Note that URLs with a path ending in a C</> are considered directories
and have the default I<index> filename appended, and that wallflower will
behave unpredictably if the site contains pages accessible through URLs
ending both in F<foo> and F<foo/>. This is arguably a bug, but it's
unclear where to fix it, or if it can be fixed at all. See
L<Wallflower::Tutorial/URI SEMANTICS COMPARED TO DIRECTORY SEMANTICS> for
background on this.

Any response with a status other than C<200> will be logged,
but not saved. Responses with a C<301> status (moved) are followed.

B<wallflower> sends the C<If-Modified-Since> header if the target
file for a given URL already exists in the destination directory.
If the application replies with a C<304> status, the file is not
modified. If the 304 response contains a C<Content-Type> header
and I<--follow> is enabled, the file will be searched for more
links to follow.

With the I<--host> option, it's possible to indicate to B<wallflower>
that some fully qualified URL should also be processed via the application.
Any URL with a hostname that doesn't match C<localhost>, the host in
the I<--url> option or a host given with I<--host> will be skipped.

=head1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

L<wallflower> started as a neat idea in a discussion between Marc
Chantreux, Alexis Sukrieh, Franck Cuny and myself in the hallway of
OSDC.fr (L<http://osdc.fr/>) 2010, after Alexis' talk about L<Dancer>.

Because a good pun should never be wasted, a first version of the
program has been included in L<Dancer> since version 1.3000_01.
Since it wasn't maintained, it has been removed in version 1.3110,
after the first release of L<App::Wallflower>.

The idea for L<App::Wallflower> owes a lot to Vincent Pit who, while
I was talking about L<wallflower> and L<Dancer> with Marc on IRC in
January 2011, noted that this file generation scheme had
nothing to do with L<Dancer> and much more with L<Plack>.

L<wallflower> treats all L<Plack> applications equally, even if the
first version of the program was targetting L<Dancer> only.

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<Wallflower::Tutorial>

=head1 AUTHOR

Philippe Bruhat (BooK) <book@cpan.org>

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2010-2018 by Philippe Bruhat (BooK).

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

=cut