Good news about Mason2 is that it can be easily installed using cpanm:

cpanm -S --notest Poet

And good news is that nowadays is pretty easy to install it on the Windows platform as well. While my production servers are always Linux, I just switched back from Mac to Windows for my desktop machine (pretty weird, isn’t it?) and I’m happy to know that I can use Mason natively rather than starting up a virtual machine.

Just install a recent version of ActivePerl, launch the cpan command and it will automatically download the gcc compiler and the dmake utilty (though you can use your own installation, if you know what you’re doing). Then you can launch the "install Poet" command at the cpan prompt, and the installation process should proceed smoothly (or somehow smoothly. Hint: sometimes "force install Poet" helps).

I’m also using Sublime Text editor, which has become my favourite editor, and with the Mason syntax it does a pretty good job.

Don’t forget to install cpanminus (with the provided ppm … Perl Package Manager) it will be very handy at a later time. Now we can test our environment:

C:\Users\fede\code>poet new test
test/.poet_root
test/bin/app.psgi
test/bin/get.pl
test/bin/run.pl
...
...

Now run 'test/bin/run.pl' to start your server.

and we can run our server, in development mode:

C:\Users\fede\code>test\bin\run.pl
Running plackup, -E, development, --port, 5000, -R, etc. etc.
HTTP::Server::PSGI: Accepting connections at http://0:5000/

Okay, we can now connect to http://localhost:5000 and see the wecome page. Later on these pages how to run our application in a production server.