One of the strengths of both Perl -- and our talk schedule -- is a diversity of ideas. We see this in the rich depth of Perl libraries on the CPAN, in the large variety of places Perl is deployed, and in the many ways people use Perl to make their lives easier.
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Perl and the Operating System
Lacey Powers -- better known as Perl's resident Postgres badass -- gives us a tour of "Debian Tips and Tricks", showing us that Debian is a fantastic platform for running your applications, Perl or otherwise, on. The talk will cover some of her favorite tips and tricks to make your life using and administering Debian easier. Debian goodies, unattended upgrades, molly guard, useful non-Debian project repositories, and many others will be covered.
With micro-services and cloud being a buzzwords of the day it's no surprise that a market for messaging systems is pretty busy at the moment.
One such system (NATS and persistent version NATS Streaming) seems to be a leader among relatively new arrivals. If interested please read more on it at its official page nats.io.
There's a lot of clients for original NATS already exist on the market, including one for Perl, Net::NATS::Client, though without support for recently added NATS Streaming. I did not think that was optimal and wrote one.
The purpose of this blog post is the announcement of new Perl Client for NATS streaming I just uploaded to CPAN and github Net::NATS::Streaming::Client.
From the README.
Net::NATS::Streaming::Client - A Perl client
for the NATS Streaming messaging system.
If you publish code to CPAN, you've probably noticed the steady improvement in its entire ecosystem over the last couple of years. ++Neil Bowers and ++the meta::cpan core hackers in particular have laboured tirelessly to improve the release process for authors and the user experience for consumers of CPAN code.
One of the things that's most useful as an author is the CPANTS Kwalitee ratings generated for any release to CPAN. The Kwalitee ranking markers are continuously being improved and added to, and I recently updated my build config to follow some recommendations the system gave me.
I use Dist::Zilla for publishing to CPAN, and I was able to address all the recommendations using Dist::Zilla plugins. Here are the newly added configs in my dist.ini:
I am now going to talk about my perl 5 code repository, it is located at http://github.com/theholyghost
There is a module HollyGame which is about the fastest game kit for adventures/RPGs and so on by using everything in lists, e.g. enemies, sprites lists which are updated every game loop and a image resource indexer which gets you the next image also from a list of images. It was primarily developed on FreeBSD, which is why they didn't include it in CPAN.
If you like Linux more then there is a HollyGameRPGAI which uses a Gauss formula of the Gauss Support Vector Machine to wander around enemies or other non-player characters.
To show the "power" of HollyGame there are examples in that same directory which use it with an SDL 1.2 layer (SDL on CPAN), there is also a Wycadia and Ultima 8 perl game start which I am further working on. The Ultima 8 program has a system for walking around in low levels of platforms inside the OctTree.pm file. Each hashed level contains intersected objects with that width, height and depth instead of a usual octtree using contained items.
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
You may not have noticed, but the London Perl Workshop is happening later this month (Saturday 25th November). It's a free-to-attend community event: organised by members of the community, for the community, and made possible by sponsorship from companies in our community.
Reinforcing the community theme, we're trying an experiment this year: crowd-sourcing bakes from attendees for one of the coffee breaks. If you're an experienced baker, an occasional dabbler (like myself), or even a complete neophyte looking for a reason to start, why not give it a go?
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 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.
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.
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;
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
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!
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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!).
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.
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.
There's more to Perl than perl. There are Perl people, there's a smattering of Perl philosophy, and there are many other peculiarities on the Perl periphery. This year's London Perl Workshop will have some great talks on Perl-y subjects that don't just focus on the language itself!
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Human Perl
Julien Fiegehenn (simbabque) will tell us how he "[Turns] humans into developers with Perl" -- his methodology for teaching apprentice software developers. He often works with young trainees who start their professional careers with very little to no prior tech knowledge and will cover the social aspects of being a mentor and show process examples that help with long-term motivation.
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:
This summary is brought to you by our Platinum Sponsor: Eligo. Eligo are a niche recruitment agency with a team of dedicated Perl Consultants, who specialise in and have experience in recruiting Perl Specialists across a wide range of sectors and roles in the UK and beyond.
This summary is brought to you by one of our sponsors: 
