blogs.perl.org

Quick introduction to AWS Lambda using CLI, Python and Perl.
Please check out the link for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-lambda

All three of us attended.

• The release is imminent while Chris Williams, who usually releases Module::CoreList, is temporarily absent. We were not all sure whether this would require any additional coordination. Phillipe had sent mail to clarify the situation. We concluded that there is no issue because CoreList is an outlier: it is not upstream-CPAN but neither is it upstream-blead, while nevertheless being maintained in core. A lagging CPAN release won’t be a problem, even though that’s not the usual sequence. In the event, Chris responded to the mail with assurance that he is available enough anyway.
• We coordinated further about the release, which is coming up the following week.
• Release blocker triage this week ended as it began: with no blockers.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Paper and talk submissions will be accepted until July 01, 2025 18:59 CDT

• https://www.papercall.io/perlcommunity
• https://www.papercall.io/cfps/6270/submissions/new

In particular I'd like to invite anyone who regrets not submitting a talk to the TPRC or who has gotten bit by the speaking bug. You are welcome to give your talk remotely.

With help from the community a development release of DBD::Oracle has been released to the CPAN.

This release includes a number of important changes that we hope will improve stability with threaded Perl.

If you are using DBD::Oracle I would ask that you try it out in your non-production environments initially and perhaps if you are confident there after, in your production environments.

The branch for it is here on github. I am personally grateful for people spending time and sending in pull requests , there is no monetary support for this driver although Oracle's open source community manager is actively engaged in discussions on issues and pull requests.

Github actions are configured on the repo and the quite thorough library of unit tests are run against Oracle XE on Ubuntu. This provides good signal but with extremely limited coverage of operating systems and database versions.

Due to the lack of variety in automated testing on Github - and the business critical nature of most Oracle databases - my recommendation is to mirror the Github repo in to your organization's repos and configure CI testing against your specific combination of Oracle versions, operating systems, and settings. The Github actions can be adapted to Gitlab reasonably quickly and give you a very high level of confidence before trialing new versions in production.

Lexical Method in the latest release Perl v5.42 RC1. For more details, follow the link: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/lexical-method-v542

Over the past year, I’ve been self-studying XS and have now decided to share my learning journey through a series of blog posts. This tenth post introduces you to what I call closures in XS.

Datastar is a new-ish entry in the world of hypermedia-oriented ,htmx alternatives, with a distinct focus on Server-Sent Events. It describes itself thus:

Datastar brings the functionality provided by libraries like Alpine.js (frontend reactivity) and htmx (backend reactivity) together, into one cohesive solution. It's a lightweight, extensible framework that allows you to:

1. Manage state and build reactivity into your frontend using HTML attributes.
2. Modify the DOM and state by sending events from your backend.

I added Perl for Datastar with Datastar::SSE, for the backend reactivity bits.

Hi, you my have noticed our "ad" showing up on on metacpan.org - many thanks to David Cross for helping us out there! You may have to hit "refresh" a few times to see it (but not too many, please! xD)

Now, as much as we'd love to see everyone in Austin, TX on July 3-4, and it's sure to be a lot of fun, the PCC is a hybrid event, meaning we do permit remote attendees and worthy talks.

We already have many exciting and highly technical Perl talks. But we are selfish and we want more. It is okay if you even repeat a talk you've given elsewhere. We offer several levels of talks, including lightning talks, which we all know is how most of us got started. Do not be afraid! :-)

• https://www.meetup.com/austin-perl-mongers/events/305855419/
• https://www.papercall.io/perlcommunity
• https://www.papercall.io/cfps/6270/submissions/new

Quick introduction to AWS DynamoDB using CLI, Python and Perl.
Please check out the link for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-dynamodb

Graham couldn’t make it, so only Aristotle and Philippe this week.

• We discussed the structure of the feature.pm documentation and how unfeatures should be covered. Philippe has provided a first patch which extends the description of each unfeature with a note stating from which feature bundle onward it is disabled.
• Relesae blocker triage continues. The meeting began without any unresolved blockers and ended the same way.
• Philippe plans to ship 5.42.0-RC1 as soon as the last missing perldelta entries are in.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Over the past year, I’ve been self-studying XS and have now decided to share my learning journey through a series of blog posts. This first post introduces the fundamentals of creating an perl object from XS.

This post is adapted from my notes and recollection of the welcome speech I gave on the morning of Thursday May 1st, 2025, just before the initial stand-up.

This post is brought to you by Booking.com, the Diamond sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025.

Booking.com is proud to sponsor the 2025 Perl Toolchain Summit as Perl continues to be a vital piece of our technology stack. We continue to rely on the Perl platform and tooling to serve millions of customers every day, helping them experience the world. Other than our interest in the evolution and modernization of the platform and tooling, the PTS is also a great opportunity to connect with the larger community and share learnings about how other companies and projects are tackling the challenges of working with Perl at scale (talking about both in systems and teams scalability), and how Perl fits an ever-changing and diverse technological landscape in other organizations.

You can learn more about Booking.com at the end of this article.

Quick refresher about Array and List in Perl.Please check out the link for more information: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/array-vs-list

We were all present.

• The status of smartmatch came up. It is in a weird position where it used to be part of the language, then was retroactively declared an experiment, then deprecated and slated for removal, and now it’s no longer being removed – in fact we’ve added a feature for it, and not an experimental one either. The bottom line is that it’s not deprecated any more and not experimental either, but is now just a negative feature like indirect and multidimensional: it’s a mistake we made that will remain part of older language versions but will not be included in future feature bundles.
• Release blocker triage continues as ever. Quite a few new issues came in recently, of which we identified two issues and one pull request as blockers. One of the issues and the PR pertain to the documentation of the status of smartmatch; we expect that there may be more inconsistencies in the documentation which will need to be ironed out.

[P5P posting of this summary]

So, what exactly is a Readonly variable in Perl? A readonly variable is one that, once assigned a value, cannot be changed. Any attempt to modify it will trigger a runtime error. This mechanism enforces immutability, ensuring that critical values remain untouched and are protected from accidental or unauthorised alterations.

I was inspired by Daniel Stenberg's recent article Detecting malicious Unicode to write Test::MixedScripts, which tests Perl source code and other text files for unexpected Unicode scripts.

Why should you care about this?

There are Unicode characters in different scripts (alphabets) that look similar and are easily confused.

A malicious person could replace a domain name or other important token with one that looks correct, for is associated with a host or other resource that they control.

Consider the two domain names, "оnе.example.com" and "one.example.com". They look indistinguishable in many fonts, but the first one has Cyrillic letters.

Confusing Unicode might be added to your codebase through a malicious patch submission or pull request. Or it could be added as text from an email or web page that you copied and pasted into your code.

The module is easy to use, and defaults to testing for Latin and Common characters:

Here is the final post about AWS S3 Server Side Encryption where I demo encryption using Customer Key.Please check out the link for more information: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-customer-key-encryption

All three of us attended.

• Release blocker triage yielded no new blockers. We followed up on the issues we were already tracking.
• The security release made some progress this week, but has been held up by the lack of a perldelta entry.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Returning from the 27th installment of the German Perl or Perl/Raku Workshop, this time in Munich, I'd like to share some impressions.

A week ago I attended the 2025 PTS. For me it was a different PTS than the previous ones.

Firstly because it was my first PTS without Abe Timmerman. He was a regular in both the PTS (as maintainer of Test::Smoke), and of the Amsterdam Perl Mongers. In fact the last time I saw him was on our flight back to Amsterdam after the PTS in Lisbon last year. He was greatly missed.

Secondly, because of a question that Book asked at the very beginning of the PTS: how often we had been to the PTS before. I was one of the few who had attended more than 10 of them. Combined with the fact that several other regular attendees couldn't make it that meant that this PTS I spent more time than ever on helping others with various issues.