On Feb 28, 2013 I gave a talk to Chicago.pm about Mojolicious. I called it an introduction, but I really wanted to show some of the features that sets Mojolicious apart. Because of this, the talk moves very fast. It hits routing and responses quickly, hits testing often, on all the way to well-tested non-blocking websocket examples.
I promised to get my slides up afterwards but life (i.e. my doctoral thesis) got in the way. Now with the release of Mojolicious 4.0 I thought I would take the opportunity to right a wrong and get the slides up; so here they are: http://mojolicious-introduction.herokuapp.com/!
The talk is itself a Mojolicious app, the source of which is available from on GitHub. Not only are all the code snippets shown in the talk included, not only do they all run, but they are actually what is rendered by the talk (DRY++), so what you see is what you get! Please leave any feedback and ask any questions. I may not see the responses here, so feel free to ping me elsewhere if needed.
As a newer member of the Mojolicious Core Development Team, I am more than usually excited for a Mojolicious release. This is because the next major release, version 4.0, is set to ship very soon! For those of you who don’t know, Mojolicious is a modern Perl web framework which is lightweight and easy to get started learning and using, while containing features that are cutting-edge. It’s asynchronous/non-blocking to the core, websockets work out of the box, comes with built-in DOM/JSON/UserAgent, etc etc.
Our fearless leader Sebastian Riedel (aka sri) will no doubt post a message with all the details when it ships. In the meantime, I want to share a little story of how community interaction, even at the StackOverflow level, can lead to innovation and enhancement of major projects like Mojolicious!
I have just sent my grant manager, Makoto Nozaki, my final grant report for Alien::Base. As I have said in the report, it has been slowed recently by my Ph.D. Thesis and Defense (successful!) and the lack of Mac CPANTesters (or at least the lack of reports on my testing modules).
TL;DR, Alien::Base is essentially ready, but work still needs to be done, and will continue.
The report is included after the break.
People may have noticed my absence from the Perl world lately. I have been writing my Ph.D. thesis (179 pages on Ultrafast Electron Microscopy with my Physics::UEMColumn Perl module featured) and defense.
Ack is a tool for searching code and text. It works much like the unix tool grep, although it is imbued with the power of Perl. To mark the release of Ack 2.0 though I wanted to mention a few one-liners that made my life easier in this stressful time.
My thesis is written in many LaTeX files and one can probably imagine that searching those files was needed regularly. The biggest is for finding non-ascii characters. As I add content from old publications or external programs, lots of non-ascii characters can often come along for the ride. LaTeX is a very old program, well pre-dating unicode, and it has a very different way of adding special characters with its own markup. In fact parts of the compiling toolchain croak with unicode characters. So I found myself using
ack '[^[:ascii:]]'
regularly. Also I had to keep a list of all the abbreviations that I had used in the paper, but of course you forget if you have them all. I used this little bash-ack conglomeration to find all sequences of two or more upper-case characters, which is how I write my abbreviations,
ack -ho '\p{Upper}{2,}' | sort | uniq
I’m sure I used many other little ackings here and there, but these were the two I could remember off-hand. Thanks to Andy and everyone who has contributed to ack!
Now go use it to make your life easier!
Visit the new site: beyondgrep.com
What is the favorite module you have released to CPAN? For me, its not some shiny CMS or fancy scientific simulation. In fact, mine is probably horribly inefficient, maybe even a little evil, but I like this one best because it is clever.
Today I used my favorite of my modules in order to accomplish a difficult task, and in doing so I found a little bug, which I have just fixed. Which one is it? Let me introduce you to Tie::Array::CSV.
As I delve into the deeper Perl magic I like to share what I can.