Most of my recent blog posts about Mojolicious have revolved around its non-blocking capabilities. I like to write about those because I think that it is those capabilities that can bring new eyes to Perl from other languages, much like Node.js brought eyes to server-side javascript (for the same reason). That said, lately I have had excuses to show off Mojolicious and when I have done so, it has been some of the other cool features that have garnered the “Ooooh”s and “Aaaah”s from onlookers.

In this article I will show you some of those extras, like accessing your generated pages and even app itself direcly from the command line. I will also show how testing can be easy, powerful, expressive and yet still readably beautiful.

Mojolicious’s 4.0 release came with lots of shiny features but it also came with a lot of housecleaning. One of the old things swept away was the memorize helper, which would cache a part of a template and prevent its repeated evaluation. Do you miss it, as some users undoubtedly do, or else does this helper sound useful to you? Then read on, because its back and better than ever!

I love open source programming. I’m continually humbled to see even the small impacts that my contributions to the Perl community have made for fellow programmers around the world. Mostly my use of Perl has been to write a complex simulation and the tools that it uses to simulate the dynamics of electron bunches in an Ultrafast Electron Microscope column, which is the subject of my recent Ph.D. thesis. So while I have enjoyed sharing my work both here and at the 2012 YAPC::NA I never would have expected that my name would mean too much in the greater Perl world.

That is why I was most surprised and humbled to receive an email not too long ago from Felipe Leprevost, a fellow scientist, Perler and organizer for this year’s YAPC::Brazil. They have chosen this year’s theme to be “The Scientific Universe,” and what a great topic it is! Perl is used by scientists around the world from astronomy to bioinformatics and yes, even in instrumentation physics, to further the pursuit of knowledge and scientific discovery.

I’m honored to announce that I have been asked to give the keynote address. I intend to use this great opportunity to discuss the use of Perl and open source software in science. Please see my abstract below.

I want to thank the organizers for this chance. I also want to invite all of you, whether scientist, programmer, or other enthusiast, to come to Curitiba this November 15-16, to enjoy what I’m sure will be a fine discussion of science and Perl. I especially want to extend a welcome to those of you in big data fields, even those outside of a scientific discipline, because big data is the way of the future for all science.

I hope to see you there!

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!

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.

I have mentioned before how much I like CPANtesters! Here is another story.

Yesterday I got an email from them listing a number of failures from Galileo, my CMS. I had recently pushed some bugfix releases, but it had some new, and as yet unused code and tests for that code in it. The tests passed on all my Linux systems, so I wasn’t worried about the release. Yet the failures came in. Some on Linux, some on other platforms, but not all the tests were failures and I couldn’t figure out a pattern. CPANtesters put me on to a problem but for this I needed faster results.

I had heard about Travis-CI, a free continuous integration platform based around GitHub. I set up travis testing for Galileo and sure enough it failed there. Though it was frustrating I now had failing tests that I could run at will! After much trial and error, I found that I had an undeclared dependency, but due to the way I was testing, it was throwing a seemingly unrelated error. My problem was that all my systems have the module installed and so I didn’t get the failure on my box, its a common module File::Next (used by Ack) and so many of the CPANtesters had it as well.

CPANtesters alerted me to the problem and Travis-CI let me continuously test on fresh platforms (5.10/12/14/16) until I found the problem. I love open source.

I have released Galileo 0.026 which fixes the problem. There are exciting additions to Galileo in the works, slowed only by my upcoming Ph.D. defense (which obviously takes much of my time). I hope that by this summer Galileo will have several of the most requested features you have told me that you would like.

Happy Perl-ing and remember to thank those projects and developers who make your lives easier, both in person and in public. Thanks guys!

Just a little note to announce the release of Galileo version 0.023. Galileo is my CMS that aims to be 100% CPAN installable, all you have to do is this:

$ cpanm Galileo
$ galileo setup
$ galileo daemon

This release makes installing even better, because now when you run galileo setup you get a web interface to configure your CMS and then install the database!

Ok that image is just slightly ahead of what is now on CPAN, but its close :-)

Hi all,

I just wanted to drop a quick note to announce #galileo on irc.perl.org as a place to talk about Galileo my CPAN installable CMS and its new companion project GalileoSend which isn’t quite to CPAN yet, but it will be soon.

GalileoSend will make sending files via websocket easy! So far the package includes a command-line sender (client) and receiver (listener/server), a Mojolicious plugin and a javascript client. Futher GalileoSend is a protocol spec, which means if you want to write a client or server in your other favorite language, or a plugin for your favorite framework, its very possible.

Interested? Drop on by and chat about it!

Today I’m happy to make public the work I’ve been doing to make some kind of “standard” for sending files over websockets. I call it GalileoSend because it was created for the Galileo CMS.

The protocol itself is language independent for both the client and server side, assuming that both can open a websocket connection and send JSON (as text) and binary data over it. Since communication by websocket is cheap, 2-way communication is highly encouraged throughout the transfer and positive confirmation of receipt is required.

Further, I have written a javascript client-side implementation (which could be used for any server) and a non-blocking Mojolicious server-side implemenation (which could be used for any client).

Read on (examples!) …

You may have noticed my commentary on the Perl version number debate. I think that that debate is a possible way of raising the profile of the language we love, but that’s not why I called.

chromatic petdance and I’m sure others have suggested that rather than infight (which I don’t believe I’m doing, btw) is to make something great and show it off. While I don’t think this is enough to raise Perl’s profile ourside of our community, I have seen and IMHO done some very cool things this week:

Things I’ve Seen

• play-perl - A social coding game
• TryPerl - An online IDE for writing and running Perl scripts (per the author, it might still need a little help). This is a “try before you install” solution.
• Farabi - A CPAN installable browser-based Perl IDE.
• PerlTuts - An interactive “learn as you go” introduction to Perl

Things I’ve Done

• Demonstate non-blocking websocket file uploads (for eventual use in Galileo)
• Played with Lvalue accessors. Should it be a MooseX module?

It may not be enough, but its always nice to share what you and others are doing. Go Perl!