I have to adjust how the SQL is produced yet again. Today I was playing about with the '60_order_by.t' tast case of Driver::DBI and had it all nicely set up and on my first run I was getting errors like this;
# Expected SQL--> INSERT INTO people ( first_name, last_name ) VALUES( ?, ? )
# Generated SQL-> INSERT INTO people ( first_name, last_name ) VALUES( ?, ? )
ORDER BY people.last_name, people.first_name
and even this
# Expected SQL--> DELETE FROM people
# Generated SQL-> DELETE FROM people
ORDER BY people.last_name, people.first_name
Who doesn't like shiny things? I love shiny things. The London Perl Workshop loves shiny things. CV-Library, this post's sponsor, loves shiny things. So if you come to the London Perl Workshop, Nov 25th, you'll learn about some shiny things.
This summary is brought to you by one of our sponsors: CV-Library. CV-Library is the UK's leading independent job board, developed in Perl and is hiring developers in its London and Fleet offices. CV-Library's technical director is also one of this year's organisers!
Shiny New Toys
The inimitable Ed J (mohawk) will be talking about his sterling progress in developing "GraphQL in Perl: The Story So Far". GraphQL is the Next Big Thing in implementing APIs, maybe even a successor to REST. Ed has ported the JavaScript reference implementation to Perl, plus written plugins for Dancer 2 and Mojolicious to make it trivial to add a GraphQL endpoint to your web application. He'll also talking about exposing DBIx::Class schemas -- and, more generally, Moose classes -- via GraphQL using introspection.
I would like to announce the first release of Inline::F2003. The project features the program "matopmul.pl", which performs a matrix multiplication calculation, to showcase the use of Inline::F2003.
Inline::F2003 is a Perl extension module that allows program units written in modern FORTRAN to be added into the "__DATA__" section of a Perl program. The term "program units" is a collective FORTRAN term that refers to subroutines, functions, and module procedures. The module reads the FORTRAN source code, compiles it into object files, and builds a single shared library file.
I left off yesterday with the problem of the little build in test DB that comes with DBI not working correctly with SQL where the table names are added to the field names. So this SQL would work;
UPDATE user SET address = ? WHERE user.username = ?
but this would not
SELECT user.username FROM user WHERE user.username = ?
Now I am either faces with drooping the '10_crud_basic.t' test case which I would like to keep or changing my code to accommodate this little DB and any others that may not like table names on the fields.
Yesterday was time change in the U. S. of A. I pulled out my iPod Touch to update a Numbers spreadsheet, and hit the "today" button to put the current date in the date column. But when I did that I got not the current date but 11 PM the previous day. Today it works as advertised.
Now, I am not privy to the internals here, but this behavior would be explained if "today" were implemented by the Objective C (or Swift, or whatever) equivalent of the following Perl:
my $date = time + $zone_offset;
$date -= $date % 86400;
One of the major strengths of Perl is the strong focus on automated testing and the pervasiveness of software testing tools on the CPAN. As you'd expect, London Perl Workshop on the 25th of November will have talks on testing!
This summary is brought to you by one of sponsors: Perl Jobs by Perl Careers. Perl Careers is a specialist Perl recruitment consultancy who can help you find your next job, run by a CPAN contributor (and one of the LPW organisers!).
Testing Talks
There's a special treat in a two-hour workshop run by Amsterdam.pm's Martin Berends and London.pm's own John Davies: Perl and Selenium workshop. Selenium is a suite of tools for driving a web-browser and testing the resulting HTML and behaviours of pages, suitable for testing web applications. Martin and John will get workshop attendees setup and ready to drive Selenium from Perl for all their web-testing needs (so bring your laptop!).
Just another test post-ette today at the Moose-pen
Will 100% pass the result from yesterdays post I wanted to see if I could get Driver::DBI at least close to that but things did not start that well;
t/00_load.t ......... 1/3 Attribute (elements) is required at /usr/local/lib/perl/5.18.2/Class/MOP/Method/Wrapped.pm line 164# Looks like your test exited with 255 just after 2.
t/00_load.t ......... Dubious, test returned 25
my basic load test was failing fortunately I think this is just missing an 'elements' attribute so I added those in where needed in a few test cases and on my next run that cleaned up a number of little things but this test case
With meta::hack v2 only two weeks away, I've written down my todo list for the hackathon. With another brand-new machine graciously provided by ByteMark, who have been hosting CPAN Testers for years, this year's hackathon will involve more devops tasks to improve reliability and stability of the various parts of the project.
The new server will be the host for CPAN Testers backend processes, the processes that turn the raw incoming data into the various reports used by the websites and downstream systems. It will also be the new home for the CPAN and BackPAN mirrors that CPAN Testers uses for data, and provides to external users as part of CPAN's mirrors list.
One major focus of discussion at the Perl 5 Core Hackathon in Amsterdam last month was the status of the program Configure. In this post, we provide a brief introduction to Configure and then discuss the work done on it at the Hackathon and in the subsequent weeks.
What Does Configure Do?
In order to build and install an executable program on a machine, the programmer first has to identify characteristics of that machine: the CPU; the operating system; the libraries; and so forth. Where the machine offers the programmer choices -- e.g., which C-compiler do you want to use -- those choices have to be recorded in a way they can be used by the build and installation procedures.
A configuration program is one which performs these tasks. When building a program from source code, the programmer will typically start with something like this:
Today just a quick test clean up for Database::Accessor, since I made quite a few changes to it over the past few days mostly making elements a required field and validating that it is not an empty array.
One of my favourites annual event that I always look forward to is "Hacktoberfest". This was introduced to me by Neil Bowers in the year 2015. Since then I never missed once. It is so fun, if you are looking constantly for any low hanging issues to grab. GitHub has helped me a lot in this. As most of you are aware, Hacktoberfest is an annual event where you are encouraged to submit at least 4 Pull Requests in the month of October against any project hosted by GitHub. There is a free gift as well, who completes the challenge, which is a specially designed T-shirt delivered to your address for free anywhere in the world. You are free to pick any projects you like hosted on GitHub. No points for guessing my choice of projects, CPAN-related distributions. In my first year 2015, I submitted 45 Pull Requests and received my free T-shirt. The following year 2016, I submitted 12 Pull Requests in the month of October and received my second consecutive free T-shirt. Here comes the year 2017, I just finished the challenge and submitted 40 Pull Requests and waiting for the newly designed T-shirt. I wear them proudly in office every now and then on Friday as the dress code is relaxed on the day. Looking forward to my next year challenge.
Last Friday was the deadline for submissons for the London Perl Workshop, and we had originally planned to let all submitters know by Monday. But it turned out that quite a few people were saving their submission for Friday, so we're still working on the schedule.
Rakudo.js now passes 74.91% of roast test (84% of the subset specified in the grant)
Recently I have been mostly fixing bugs and implementing missing bits and pieces.
For example :i and :m modifiers in regexes now work a lot better and I have added dynamic quantifiers in regexes like a /"foo" ** {rand.round}/
I have also played around with implementing stuff that's needed for NativeCall (two of the test for passing simple values back and forth work).
I plan to continue working on fixing up the failing roast tests.
I have been a Perl programmer and advocate for almost 20 years. It has
saddened me to see Perl loosing ground among newer generations of programmers
to languages such as Python, Ruby, and php. Although those languages have
their strong points and interesting features, in my opinion, Perl is still
a superior language for most general programming applications for various
technical reasons, which I will not go into in this posting. That's the
subject of a different religious war.
At the very least, Perl should be holding at least an equal standing in
popularity to these other languages.
Fast, often loud, and the finale of the London Perl Workshop, lightning talks share a lot in common with the fireworks lighting up our skies this weekend.
The response to the call for longer talk submissions has already been amazing, so we’re not going to be able to squeeze in any unscheduled talks this year, but if you didn't submit a full talk proposal in time, you can still participate with a lightning talk!
So, if you have a proposal just waiting to explode (see what I did there? ;) submit it on or before this coming Monday, the 6th November at londonperlworkshop.org/newtalk. And, see our previous post for hints and tips on how to make your 5 minute lightning talk go with a bang!
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