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

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

10_crud_basic.t

See also my previous report on news.perlfoundation.org and blogs.perl.org.

In October, I have worked over 50 hours on YAML related stuff. Read on...

Configure at the Perl 5 Core Hackathon

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:

    $> ./configure --config-option-1 --config-option-2=foo

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past two and a half weeks.

Enjoy!

Test post-ette day again here in the Moose-pen

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.

Attribute (elements) is required at …

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.

Read on for the gory details.

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.

Its another step back day here in the Moose-Pen

my $da = Database::Accessor->new( { view => { name => 'test' } },
                                    elements=>[] );

Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference 
at GitHub\database-accessor\lib/Database/Accessor.pm line 715.

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.

Every year since 2009, the Rakudo Perl 6 community publishes a Rakudo Perl 6 advent calendar, in the form of blog posts on perl6advent.wordpress.com.

To keep up this great tradition, we need 24 blog posts, and volunteers who write them. If you want to contribute a blog post about anything related to Rakudo Perl 6, please add your name (and potentially also a topic already) to the schedule, and if you don't yet have a login on the advent blog, please tell Zoffix or someone on #perl6 IRC chat your email address so that they can send you an invitation.

Rakudo Perl 6 advent blog posts should be finished the day before they are due, and published with midnight (UTC) of the due date as publishing date.

If you have any questions, or want to discuss blog post ideas, please join on the #perl6 IRC channel on irc.freenode.org.

I was fortunate to be invited to participate in the 2017 Perl 5 Core Hackathon (P5H) held in Amsterdam from Thursday, October 12 to Sunday, October 15. This event brings together contributors to the Perl 5 core development process -- often referred to as the "Perl 5 Porters" (P5P) -- for discussion on the current state and future of the language and for hacking to get us to that future state.

Its two steps backward day here in the Moose-Pen

gather => {
        elements => [],
        conditions=>[{
                left => {
                    name => 'last_name',
                },
                right             => { value => 'Bloggings' },
                operator          => '=',
            },]
            },

As you'd hope, the London Perl Workshop on Nov 25th will feature lots and lots and lots of Perl. But there's also a chance to escape the echo chamber!

• Former leader of the London Perl Mongers Sue Spence will dive into "Spiders, Gophers & Butterflies", looking at how a concurrent web crawler compares written in Go and in Perl 6
• Colin Newell tells us "Why learning a bit of Crypto is good for you", and looks at common security mistakes made by developers who don't know a basic smattering of crypto.
• Steven Goodwin show us (tongue in cheek) paradigms from the 16 languages he's worked with professionally which Perl developers may not be familiar with in "Ada 99 - Rewriting the very first computer program".

As a bonus, Dave Cross will be showing us exactly how the echo chamber is escaped in his lightning talk of the same name!

Attendance is free, so if you can get to London on the 25th of November, register online now at: http://londonperlworkshop.org

Version 0.16 of GraphQL implements most of using the Schema Definition Language to create schemas, rather than doing so programmatically. So let's now translate all the idioms in the JavaScript GraphQL tutorial into Perl!

EDIT version 0.17 implements the rest, so this tutorial translated has been updated slightly as you don't need to specify a schema at all if you call your query type Query, etc.

The format I'll use is to give each of the JS tutorial pages, with the Perl code to do what's given there:

Getting Started With GraphQL.js

You will need Perl 5.14. Consider using perlbrew to get this.

cpanm Mojolicious::Plugin::GraphQL # also gets Mojolicious and GraphQL

Then the first script:

At the Toolchain Summit this year, one of the discussion sessions was to reflect on how the DBIx::Class ownership conflict was handled. We didn't only discuss DBIx::Class, but how a range of other situations were handled. One of the outcomes of that session was a request that the PAUSE admins document the rules and principles for how PAUSE is operated, and how various situations are, or will be going forward, resolved.

Since then the PAUSE admins have been discussing various scenarios and gradually working on a document which we ended up calling the PAUSE Operating Model. The name reflects that it not only describes how PAUSE works, but how the PAUSE admins run the service.

The rest of this post gives an outline of what the document covers, and where you can read it.

Its a good day for code but a bad one for posts here in the Moose-Pen

I started off today by adding in some 38 new tests to 40_joins.t in Driver::DBI and after one or two runs to get rid of some typos in my expected results they are all passing. So like the title says a good day for code but a bad one for posts as I have nothing to much to report on.

Undaunted I moved into 50_having.t and the first thing I did was rename it to 50_group_by.t as that is a little more SQLish.

After coming up with some 34 new tests and after a few runs to get rid of my usual typos in my expected SQL I still got two errors on the generated SQLthat where far from obvious.

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!

Many of you who have been around computers for as long as I have remember the Semantic Web. It was touted in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s as a way to organise and reason over the Web. This was before the rise of Google and the modern web as we know it today. Mostly, the Semantic Web died because of the problem with Metacrap. However, the idea was resurrected in 2006 as Linked Data. The problem has since been relegated to academia, a few Government projects, like UK’s data.gov.uk, and, interestingly, bio-medical.