blogs.perl.org

Hi!

Outthentic is a generic test framework based on Outthentic::DSL

Here is the link.

Small, but hopefully useful improvements:

• ability to pass configuration files as ini files in Config::Tiny format - thanks to Ron Savage for great module.

• set_stdout could be called more then once acting like push into array.

• test runner - host parameter is respected in case you are going to write tests for some network application

This year, I begin my nineteenth year of professional programming with Perl. It seems that I just can quit you, Perl.

Not that there is a compelling reason to do so. Sure, there are a lot of "hot" newish language/frameworks out there, like node.js, ruby on rails and python/django. And those tools are worth getting to know, not the least of which reason to do so is in the pursuit of paying gig.

Popularity of a technology is mostly important when you start a project and when all technologies are equally alien to you. In my case, Perl is home. It is the tool I can use nearly in my sleep. I know where the pitfalls are and where it shines.

The crack about Perl being write-only line noise has always annoyed me. Every language can be have hard to follow programs written in them. At least Perl often makes it easy to untangle them (thanks, perl debugger).

Wow, you people.

A person's experience with a programming language involves many aspects: how a user first learns that a language exists, their first steps in that language, their process of learning more about it, developing in it, contributing to it, and spreading the word about it are all part of that experience. In short, it's a huge swath of elements, which is why it's important to have a means to efficiently identify any issues in that experience, so that it can be improved.

I'd like to announce the creation of The Perl 6 User Experience Repository. Its main page enumerates various aspects of the Perl 6 User Experience and the sub-pages will outline plans to overcome any of the identified problems, or perhaps serve as a documentation repository for protocols, lists of contacts, or other additional files.

HI!

Today I want to write a short post about my recent attempts to test chef cookbooks with test kitchen and swat.

I am not going to explain here what chef and test kitchen is. I believe most of us heard about this configuration management system and testing framework for it.

But in few words test kitchen provides some capabilities for chef cookbook developers rapidly test their recipes under various platforms and environments.

Recently a good idea came into my mind. Swat could be a good companion for all this eco system. As far as:

• swat provides DSL for rapid web tests development
• sparrow is a small swat infrastructure tool acting like cpan client for swat modules get installed from SparrowHub - central repository for shareable swat test suites

So I went ahead and created some useful test suites could be run as simple integration tests for 2 popular chef cookbooks:

• apache2 - maintained by Sander van Zoest
• httpd - maintained by Opscode itself

Here it is 2 sparrow plugins to test those cookbooks:

I'm a fussy person I guess. I haven't really like the way I can filter or search for events that might interest me for the two gaming conventions I've attended the last few years, GenCon and Gary Con.

GenCon provides an excel file of events that gets updated before event registration starts. Gary Con hasn't had this yet so I scrape it. For both of them I munged that data into a sqlite db.

Now, being the sharing guy that I am I was wondering how I could share this data, other than just throwing the sqlite file somewhere. RapidApp to the rescue. I tinkered with it a bit for last year's GenCon, I didn't get it sorted out well enough to show off to the public.

This year however is different (at least for Gary Con). Especially after vanstyns' talk at YAPC::NA 2015.

Let’s say I opened a restaurant and people liked it.

Then I add an item to the menu called “Fish and Chips”. My restaurant’s version would serve a smoked salmon with a light butter/caper topping and fresh potato chips (crisps for those of you across the pond). I could certainly do it … but people would be confused.

No amount of explaining to each patron would prevent the next patron from being confused by the name. Even if I explained on several pieces of my printed materials and told customers if they asked, people would still certainly miss it, because they know what “Fish and Chips” means.

If I then claimed that the name wasn’t confusing because I had explained the differences several times, I would be wrong. It still is confusing. Claiming it isn’t doesn’t make it so.

DBD::SQLite 1.49_05 (with SQLite 3.10.0) is a release candidate of the next stable DBD::SQLite. As always, please test it with your modules/applications and let me know if you find anything, especially if you're using a PerlData virtual table, and/or ReadOnly attribute. If there's no blocker nor request to wait, I'll release 1.50 in the mid February.

DBD::SQLite 1.50 will also have JSON functions (http://www.sqlite.org/json1.html) and indices on expressions (http://www.sqlite.org/expridx.html) introduced in SQLite 3.9.

See Changes file in the distribution for other fixes and improvements.

Hi everyone,

I haven't written about our last releases because I was a bit stressed for time. Allow me to apologize for that.

We have just released a new version of Dancer2 and I think it's time to share the work we've done recently and where we're going with the next releases.

I mean, can you get it any more WRONG?! The juvenile logo and awful color scheme of the website. The Christmas release that isn't all release-like. Version 6.c? Why not 6.0? What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max? And why is it called "Perl" in the first place? They should rename it!!

Too little, too late. Is there a need for a new Perl? No, of course not. What is it good for? Nothing. What is its business case? None! What's Perl 6's "Killer App"? Non-existent. Why in the world would anyone use Perl 6?!

Strawberry Perl 5.22.1.2 and 5.20.3.2 are available at http://strawberryperl.com

Both contain security fixes for CVE-2015-8607 + CVE-2015-8608

More details in Release Notes:
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.22.1.2-64bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.22.1.2-32bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.20.3.2-64bit.html
http://strawberryperl.com/release-notes/5.20.3.2-32bit.html

I would like to thank our sponsor Enlightened Perl Organisation for resources provided to our project.

perl6-slang-roman lets you write your Perl 6 code using Roman numerals:

use Slang::Roman

sub conjunctivus( Int $a, Int $b ) { $a + $b }
say conjunctivus( 0rIV, 0rVI );
# 10

And by the way, yes, it's fully Unicode compliant, so you can even write your numbers with \c[ROMAN NUMERAL ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND]. There's apparently a method of adding overbars to your Roman numerals that extends their range into the millions and beyond, but I think that I probably should leave well enough alone.

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for the past week. Enjoy!

About a week ago I expressed my concerns about Perl 6′s future and people came out of the woodwork to tell me about all of Perl 6′s features, but didn’t really address what I was asking: What are the business cases for Perl 6? 

So I decided, maybe I should think about what kinds of cool businesses and apps could be built using Perl 6′s new feature-set. Mind you, I’m not going to build any of these anytime soon. I’ve already got too many businesses for my own good and I’m launching another next month. This is just a mental exercise in the hopes that it might inspire some other folks.

I’m going to start with Perl 6′s async features as a business case, because I think it’s easy for people to wrap their heads around the benefits. In the future I’ll tackle a few other Perl 6 features as business ideas.

Hi! This is a simple swat monitoring test suite for blogs.perl.org. Probably blogs.perl.org maintainers already have some monitoring stuff, but if not, guys, I would be glad to share this one with you! :-) , let me know in case you have other ideas on how this suite could be adjusted for your needs.

So, it's been a couple months or so since I last posted about this. Since then, I gave a talk about it at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. After that, I took a Perl 6 hiatus because life got busy and I was a little burned up. In the past few weeks, I've done a little bit of work: cleaning up somethings, making changes that'd been slow cooking in my brain during hiatus, etc. However, I'm putting P6SGI on another hiatus, but this time it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the state of Perl 6.

As a followup I just finished Bottoms Up where I walk through a tiny but complete grammar for a small corner of PHP code.

After a remarkably long wait, several false starts, and an unfathomable amount of work by the community, Perl 6 is here. Let's see just how easy it is to get up and running and to write a few simple programs.

Read more on my blog: Perl 6: Up and Running with rakudobrew.

I went to see the new Star Wars film on my birthday. I feel now that the movie has been out for a few weeks that I could discuss the striking final scene. This final scene is also of great interest to any one wants to understand and appreciate the early Irish subtext of the final scene and how this may play out in the future.

Spoilers Ahead