We're still hacking away on the Veure MMORPG and things are moving forward nicely, but I thought some folks would like to hear more about our development process. This post is about our test suite. I'd love to hear how it compares to yours.

Here's the full output:

$ prove -l t
t/001sanity.t ... ok   
t/perlcritic.t .. ok     
t/sqitch.t ...... ok     
t/tcm.t ......... ok       
All tests successful.
Files=4, Tests=740, 654 wallclock secs ( 1.57 usr  0.20 sys + 742.40 cusr 15.79 csys = 759.96 CPU)
Result: PASS

Let's break that down so you can see what we've set up. You'll note that what we've built strongly follows my Zen of Application Test Suites recommendations.

I've gotten a bit of grief over the title of a TechBeacon article I recently wrote: Why Perl 6 is the "Game of Thrones" of programming languages. I wrote the article, but the editors chose that title based on a throwaway line a couple of paragraphs in:

Like A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), which was started back in 1991 and is still being, ahem, "developed," good things come to those who--well, you know.

To be completely honest, I could have objected and the editors at TechBeacon would have changed it back. However, I didn't object because I was honestly curious what the reaction would be. The general reaction so far has been "great article, awful title." I've no idea if that clickbait title helped draw enough traffic to offset the bad impression of the title itself.

In other news, I now write semi-regularly for TechBeacon and you can check out the list of articles I've written (I'd write more often but I just don't have the time).

• When agile is the wrong choice for your organization
• How agile is killing management, and boosting productivity
• Perl is not dead: It was early web novices that gave it a bad name

In fact, now that I think about it, the "wrong choice" title might be the only one I wrote.

For the curious, TechBeacon is a Hewlett Packard project to have a dev and tech site with articles written a bit more on the business side of the divide rather than just the technical side. It's a nice initiative and I hope it does well. The IT world needs more efforts in crossing the business/technical divide.

Working on a large internationalization (I18N) for one of our clients and I found myself in a curious position where I needed to build an I18N objects from users, companies, and web sites. It's tricky because there are multiple ways the object can be instantiated:

my $i18n = Our::I18N->new( domain  => $domain );
my $i18n = Our::I18N->new( user    => $user );
my $i18n = Our::I18N->new( company => $company );
my $i18n = Our::I18N->new( request => $c->request ); # at the Catalyst layer

Anything consuming the I18N object should be able to do things such as determine country and language, but should not be able see the user, company, or request because they should not be tightly coupled. There are tricks I could do with BUILDARGS to make the above work, but frankly, that's a pain and often a nasty hack. That's when bare Moose attributes and meta hacking come in handy.