Selected Release Announcements

use.perl

  • Belgian Perl Workshop February 28th, 2009 - 2nd edition.
    I am very pleased to announce the Belgian Perl Workshop 2009 - 2nd edition. Among the invited speakers are Jonathan Worthington, Abigail and Matt Trout. The theme for this year's workshop is "Discovering Perl". Track Themes are: Perl Discovered by Companies Perl on the work floor empowering companies to make ICT-based business happen, grow, flourish.Perl Discovery Perl Tech Topics: from Beginner's up to Expert LevelPerl Lightning TalksPerl Catalyst Discovery Perl Catalyst Tech Topics: from Beginner's up to Expert LevelPerl Catalyst Hands-On And of course a Perl Social Event in the evening :-). Official languages are English (preferred), Dutch & French. This event takes place on February 28th, 2009 in Leuven (30 kms east and only 20 minutes by train from Brussels ). There is still room left for speakers and participants, so do subscribe.

    Read more of this story at use Perl.


  • The most significant Perl::Critic release in a long while.
    Perl::Critic 1.094 is on its way to a CPAN mirror near you. There are a number of changes in it, but there's one in particular that I want to point out. A new policy called Miscellanea::ProhibitUselessNoCritic.

    Read more of this story at use Perl.


  • Dynamic CPAN Testers Reports - Phase One
    After the last major update to CPAN Testers Reports website, the plan had always been to move to a more dynamic site. While a fully fledged dynamic site is still planned, the move is being made gradually with significant updates. As such the last updates have now been made live.

    Read more of this story at use Perl.


  • CPAN Patching with Git
    A few months ago, brian posted a blog entry about patching modules using Git. In the ensuing discussion, I pointed at a possible way to automatise the process a step further by punting the generated patch to rt.cpan.org. The hack was well-received and, with (very) minimal coaxing, I was subsequently convinced to expand on the idea for The Perl Review.

    Read more of this story at use Perl.


  • Perl 5 now uses Git for version control
    acme writes "The Perl Foundation has migrated Perl 5 to the Gitversion control system, making it easier than ever for Perl's developmentteam to continue to improve the language that powers many websites." Read below for the full announcement (and the instructions for getting the sources).

    Read more of this story at use Perl.


perl.com

  • Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2
    Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl.

  • A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10
    Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using modern Perl productively.

  • Using Amazon S3 from Perl
    Amazon's Simple Storage Service provides a simple, flexible, and inexpensive way to manage online data storage. Amazon's S3 modules for Perl make storing and retrieving data in your own programs almost trivial, leaving Amazon to worry about hosting, scaling, and backups. Abel Lin shows how to store, retrieve, and store data with Amazon S3.

  • Reverse Callback Templating
    Many programmers know of the two main systems of templating. One embeds actual source code into the template. The other provides a mini language with loops, conditionals, and other control structures. There is a third way -- a reverse callback system. James Robson explains this best-of-both-worlds approach by demonstrating Perl's Template::Recall module.

  • Elements of Access Control
    Some data is private. Other data, less so. Secure applications make it possible--and easy--to keep user data visible to the right people and invisible to the wrong people. Vladi Belperchinov explains how access control works and demonstrates with working code suitable for implementing your own access controls.

Recent CPAN Uploads

Perl Buzz

  • The evolution of Perl frameworks

    by Mark Stosberg

    In 2006, the arena of Perl web frameworks pitted the heavyweight Catalyst against the lightweight CGI::Application. Since then Perl’s framework options have continued to evolve. While both CGI::Application and Catalyst remain popular, several new options have appeared lately. Here’s a quick rundown.

    Titanium provides CGI::Application and a bundle of recommended plugins with unified documentation and easier installation. Because the underlying components are the same solid ones that have already been in use, it’s safe and stable to use, despite the new name. Future plans include providing a download package which bundles the dependency chain, for even easier installation.

    HTTP::Engine is Moose-based evolution of the HTTP request object we saw in Catalyst, along with the abstractions to run web apps on various server backends. In short, it focuses on the HTTP parts of the web framework stack. On top of that you can build a complete framework in whatever style you want.

    Mojo and Mojolicious represent a project lead by Sebastian Riedel, one of the original Catalyst contributors. Mojo is distictive for having no dependencies beyond core Perl. Mojo provides the same kind of low-level HTTP components as HTTP::Engine, while Mojolicious represents one possible complete framework built on top of it. Mojolicious’ distictive feature is a new dispatching design in the spirit of Ruby-on-Rails “Routes”. I have more in-depth review of Mojo.

    Some trends I see:

    • Shared infrastructure — While Perl frameworks continue to compete at a high level, we continue to collaborate on shared utility modules. Projects like HTTP::FillInForm and Data::FormValidator get used by several frameworks, not re-invented.
    • CGI.pm must die — While we share some things, HTTP::Engine, Catalyst and Mojo have all invented their own HTTP request object, replacing the function of CGI.pm. Clearly there is an interest is moving beyond this old standby, which crams 172 subroutines into the CGI name space. (CGI::Application remains neutral on this point, outsourcing the query object)
    • Potential for convergence — A number of CGI::Application and Catalyst plugins are rather similar, but not interchangable. Because they are open source, they are usually easy to port from one framework to the other, but this is not ideal. HTTP::Engine and Mojo are both a kind of “framework for frameworks”. I see potential for projects to agree on which backend they use, while providing distinctive experiences for programmers who may want to choose a lightweight framework or a featureful one. The result could be web framework plugins which more widely useful to the Perl community.

    Mark Stosberg has been using programming Perl for the web for over a decade. He is the Principal Developer at Summersault and maintains several CPAN modules including Titanium and Data::FormValidator.


  • Perl 6 and Rakudo command line to be worked on in earnest

    The Perl Foundation has announced a Hague Grant for Jerry Gay to implement the Rakudo Perl command line interface.

    The work will be to define the S19 synopsis pertaining to command-line interaction with Perl 6, and to provide a Rakudo implementation of the synopsis.

    Jerry will need to document the Perl 6 command line syntax, implement its tests, create a command line parsing library for Parrot, and implement a subset of the Perl 6 command line syntax.

    I couldn't be happier with this direction. I made some vain stabs at command line interaction on Rakudo long ago, but not much came of it. Having a command line interface will make it much easier for users to work with Rakudo as it progresses. Perl without being able to do filtering magic isn't very Perly, no?

    Patrick Michaud also received a Hague Grant, to work on the Perl Compiler Toolkit and regexes and other internal hoohah. I'm sure it's useful, but this feeble-minded reporter's head hurt when trying to follow the details of the grant.


  • Speak up for Catalyst

    By Kieren Diment

    Over the past couple of months, Matt Trout and I have been putting together a book proposal for the Catalyst web framework. We did this because a. we want to publish a book about Catalyst, and b. because a publisher approached us. Now that the proposal is in, the editorial board are concerned that there is insufficient market.

    I've looked at a bunch of statistics (mailing list size, Google hits, IRC channel size, Amazon sales rankings and more) to compare the size of Catalyst to a group of other web frameworks. Catalyst comes out at the bottom of the top of this list, in that it's the least popular of the "big" frameworks - Ruby on Rails, Django and so on. On the other hand, it's clearly an order of magnitude more popular than the small frameworks (Pylons, Turbogears and the like). We also know that Catalyst runs some pretty big streaming media websites, including some that we're a bit embarrassed (NSFW) to talk about. Catalyst is also rumoured to be running the BBC iPlayer.

    Our publisher now has cold feet, and wants to collect more data on the size of the market before they give us the go-ahead, so if you use Catalyst, please answer a short survey for us . My aim is 100 responses (10% of mailing list subscribers).

    The questions are as follows:

    • What country are you in?

    • How many people are on your team?

    • How many of those people are writing code with Catalyst? If there are non Catalyst coders on your team, how many of the
      whole team would you like to be writing Catalyst code?

    • How many people using Catalyst on your team are subscribers to the
      Catalyst mailing list?

    • How many people writing Catalyst code on your team use the
      #catalyst IRC channel on irc.perl.org?

    • What do you see as potential for growth of Catalyst in your organisation? How many people do you think will be using Catalyst in your
      organisation in 12 months? In 2 years?



    Please email your answers to kdiment@uow.edu.au.

    Kieren Diment is a Researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He uses Perl and Catalyst for the social science research that he does.


  • BBC joins Parrot Foundation advisory board

    The Parrot folks announced that the BBC was now on its advisory board, and it makes me happy to see. It's good to have big players in the Perl world like ActiveState join the advisory board, but I think it will mean much more to the outside world to see organizations outside of the software industry involved.

    Thanks to all at the Parrot Foundation for what I'm sure took untold hours of discussion, red tape and finagling.


  • Devel::NYTProf continues its march of awesomeness

    The mighty Tim Bunce has added yet more cool features in 2.07. Brief summary:

    • Runs on Windows
    • You can now turn off statement-level profiling and just have subroutine-level profiling, for speed's sake
    • Tracks recursion more accurately
    • Subroutine calls made within string evals are now shown in reports.

    Check the full change log for all the details.

    Can we just all please buy Tim a beer for all his work on Devel::NYTProf, and Adam Kaplan for starting it? NYTProf is fantastic.


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