July 2013 Archives

Who's relying on that CPAN release?

Sometimes it's useful to know who exactly is relying on your CPAN distribution - for example, if you're planning an incompatible API change for a module, and wish to contact people using it to give them advance notice. MetaCPAN handily includes a "reverse dependencies" link for every distribution. However, sometimes that might not be enough; you may want recursive results. In which case you need to dig around in the MetaCPAN API.

Thankfully there's a little module called MetaCPAN::API that helps you do just that. Here's how I've used it (plus Moo) to retrieve recursive dependencies starting at a seed...

Data::Dumper::GUI

Everyone knows all that command-line stuff is for weirdo geeks, right? ;-) So let's bring Data::Dumper kicking and screaming into the 21st century and give it a pretty GUI!

ddGUI.png

Introducing Data::Dumper::GUI; a GUI for Data::Dumper. It allows you to view your data structures as a tree with collapsible nodes. Data::Dumper::GUI is built using Prima (a rather nice GUI toolkit designed specifically for Perl, that supports Win32 and X11, with no dependencies and compiles pretty quickly... for a GUI toolkit) and Moo.

About Toby Inkster

user-pic I'm tobyink on CPAN, IRC and PerlMonks.