After struggling with ExtJS for a while, I've decided to let go of it. Not in favor of jQueryUI or any other UI. Not even if favor of writing a UI myself (other than, perhaps, a few loose forms that make you want to vomit). I've decided to work on what I do - the backend.
This is actually something that took me a while to understand. I don't write UIs, I don't write websites, I don't write frontend. I'm not good at that, it doesn't even interest me. I love working on backend, I like writing the engine, I like fiddling with the Perl code. I don't enjoy Javascript, I don't enjoy XHTML, CSS, or any other such thing. I don't like debugging obscure IE bugs. It's not my thing.
I thought I'd write my own practical version of Moose::Manual::Unsweetened by converting Hailo away from Moose. The resulting hack passes all of Hailo's tests but not surprisingly it wasn't worth it.
I wanted to see if I could get the startup time of Hailo down since Moose doesn't incur a runtime penalty once all your classes have been constructed. Here's how much time it takes the three version of Hailo to start up and reply to input, and how much (RSS) memory they use:
Hacky Perl OO: 100ms / 5.6MB
Mouse: 150ms / 7.4MB
Moose: 350ms / 12MB
Mouse seems to get a lot of flak within Moose circles for not being a 100% complete Moose implementation. I previously wrote about how you can maintain dual support for Moose and Mouse in a previous posting.
In future programs I'll be using Mouse as the default with a fallback to Moose. It does everything I need from Moose and doesn't suffer from the high startup time / memory use that's frequently cited as an objection to Moose-based applications.
If that doesn't convince you, here's a mouse riding a frog:
Once in a while we talk about things such as GreyPAN or DarkPAN referring to open source Perl code that is not on CPAN or code that is hidden behind corporate firewalls respectively. It might be interesting to see if we can encourage more of that code to be released to CPAN.
AFAIK Bugzilla is one of the successful Perl projects in terms of user base but it does not have a huge mind share in the Perl community. I am not sure what are the reasons but I think the fact that it is not on CPAN is part of this so I looked at the project a bit.
Getting the source code
Bugzilla has a wiki page for developers where you can find information on how to contribute to the project. They just recently switched from CVS to Bazaar which is a nice distributed vcs. Instructions on how to get the source code can be found on the Bugzilla Bazaar page.
Is it just me who has to re-authenticate on every single page load, or is this a known issue? It's really annoying? I seem to keep my session fine on the front page, but the MT interface asks me to authenticate every. single. time. I change pages, whether through a GET or POST request.
There are plenty of interesting and valuable projects on CPAN that do not have their own websites. I know, I know, CPAN gives us a default website ("with a reasonable design") and all we need to do is write the code and POD. Yes, that's great.
But wouldn't you rather advertise yourself, your product and Perl along the way? Then your project should have its own website. Yes, it should. No, I'm right!
A website represents you and your project. If it's beautiful, you're beautiful (even if you're ugly). If it's approachable, your project is approachable. If it gives a warm feeling to the user, so does your project and so will your project be for the user's boss - at least at first. Which means that if you're certain your code is great and approachable ("once given a shot"), you should make sure it gets a fair shot, by making it appealing.
While my Enterprise Perl cartoon may seem like a joke, it's not. It's a sad fact that for larger codebases, tests can take a long, long time to run. The one I used on the BBC PIPs project took an hour and twenty minutes to run when I left that team. The one I use on the BBC Dynamite project takes just over an hour to run. Adam Kennedy, on the Enterprise Perl post, reported his tests can take a couple of hours to run.
I just bought an
Archos 5 Internet tablet
. The whole mobile world is quite new for me. My mobile phones were quite old fashioned and I never tried to install any application there. The small screen size wasn't too attractive.
So I am learning. So far I managed to connect it to wifi and even installed AppsLib which seems to be the main interface to install additional applications.
I tried the GPS but so far I don't think I saw it working but I was just sitting at home with the devices and it might need some movement. No idea. Never had a GPS.
Anyway, one of the main reasons I bough this and not some other devices is that I wanted to research - you see I had to have a "business reason" to buy it :-) - how can I run applications written in Perl on it.
I searched a bit about Perl on Android but so far I found relatively little information. I think it is quite important and probably will be a lot of fun to run Perl on the device so I started to collect the little information I found about
Perl on Android. If you have any more details or pointers I'd appreciate your additions.
Yesterday, I was thinking about this same exact thing. I have a project where the compile-time hit of the collective libraries that make up the application is a little on the heavy side. I thought to myself that it would be good use something like Test::Aggregate, but I wondered if that could mean that some of my tests could be affected by a downstream dependency where the state could be changing at the class level. I don’t think it’s very probable, but it could happen and it would be a real pain to debug.
In Modules vs Applications, Sawyer X noted that one of the "issues" (emphasis mine) of Perl people is the tendency to write modules instead of applications. That CPAN is great but due to the lack of end user programs there is no WOW factor. He suggested that we write programs/applications that everyone can use to attract more people to Perl.
While I agree with the last suggestion, I don't agree with the preference to modularize everything as an issue. As someone who wrote a program years ago that is comprised of many separate scripts and duplicated code (even in different languages, just for the fun of it) and still have to maintain it today, I'd say that not putting as much code as possible into reusable modules is a mistake.
I'd instead suggest that we still write modules (which is what made CPAN great anyway), but try to *also* accompany each distribution with a demo app (preferably in the App:: namespace).
Most of my work with DPAN revolves around the creation of private, CPAN-like repositories that a project team can use without affecting anyone else. Setting up a DPAN process for a recent customer involved making several MiniCPANs, one for each project group. I had to add a couple of features to CPAN::Mini to make it work out. These new features show up in CPAN::Mini 1.100590.
Like most CPAN tools, CPAN::Mini assumed that there would only ever be one repository, so a person tasked with maintaining several had a problem. Consider this workflow to support several groups:
There's a master MiniCPAN that holds all of the modules anyone in the company is allowed to use. The remote is a real CPAN.
Slave MiniCPANs pull from and filter the modules in the master to contain just the modules their application needs. The remote is the master MiniCPAN.
DPAN (or CPAN::Mini::Inject) adds project specific modules to the slaves.
Monday and Tuesday there were two Israeli Perl Mongers (israel.pm) meetings, of Haifa.pm and Rehovot.pm, respectively. I gave a talk at both of them.
Haifa is way up north compared to where I stay ("middle earth", A.K.A., Tel Aviv). I took an hour-long train ride there with Shlomi Fish. Then we walked over to Qualcomm, where Shmuel greeted us and offered snacks and drinks. I had foolishly forgot that not all places necessarily have a computer designated for the projector and didn't bring mine. Shmuel brought his and we hooked things up. (Tip: always carry a copy of Portable Open Office!)
and the logs will be displayed to screen. The default level is WARN, but if you want to debug things:
% DEBUG=1 perl -MLog::Any::App ...
or if you want to quiet things down:
% LOGLEVEL=error perl -MLog::Any::App ...
If you put 'use Log::Any::App' in your script, when run it will by default log to file too (~/prog.log or /var/log/prog.log). It can even automatically log to syslog.
I was reading yet another post that was trying to bash Perl without actually pointing at a feature that is really bad in the language when I saw that comment about
reverse reverse "hello"
not doing what the author wanted.
This is the point when I was trying to imagine someone sitting in front his TV and double clicking on the on/off button and being surprised it "does not work".
It's very interesting watching people use Test::Class. Usually, it's wrong. This isn't really a fault of Test::Class, though (well, not much), but rather, it's a fault of its documentation. It needs more.
A while ago, I answered to Sawyer's blog post "On low attendance in TelAviv.pm meetings" basically saying that I challenge the idea that the event he referred to is a TelAviv.pm at all. I was being facetious and nitpicking, but my motive was, and still is, my belief that the .pm meetings are a perl-centric, social gathering of like-minded Perl, ahem, mongers, and should be treated in the same way that you treat 4-5 perl guys who meet in a pub.
This is why I was very excited about the re-emergence of Haifa.pm, which was exactly what I was thinking about, a non-formal, friendly gathering of like-minded people that wanted to share their affection for Perl. And for that I want to thank both Uri Bruck and Shmuel Fomberg for organizing this event, and for inviting me to speak, which I always love and dread to do.
"tong() method can connect to database"
"tong() method can disconnect from database"
"sha() method can delete an existing file"
"sha() method fails when deleting a non-existing file"
or:
"tong 1"
"tong 2"
"sha 1"
"sha 2"
They are both rather extreme, but if I had to choose, I would still rather go with the shorter ones. I tend to treat test names more like unique IDs, and when things go wrong I just look up the actual test code.
I wouldn't mind verbose test names though if they can somehow be automatically generated (a future Google Translate project, perhaps?) from code, because they are just repeating what the code says.
The Icelandic Society For Digital Freedoms (Icelandic abbreviation:
FSFI) is organizing the annual Nordic Perl Workshop, this year, in
Reykjavik, Iceland. It will be the first time the workshop is held in
Iceland.
Nordic Perl Workshop 2010 will take place over the weekend of May 1st to
May 2nd.
FSFI has now opened for registration and submissions of presentation
abstracts. We encourage anyone who is interested in sharing their
experience or ideas to submit their abstract. Registration fee is €100.
Included in the fee is a workshop dinner at "The Perl" restaurant
(http://www.perlan.is).
Was writing a script and stopped just to write this and ask... what is your favorite quote delimiter? I mean, what do you use to delimit quote words, or regular expressions?
I find out that most of the time I use the slash for regular expressions because with them I can not type the preceding 'm'. But, for instance, on use CGI qw.:standard.; I am liking more the dot. When substituting paths, I prefer to use the exclamation mark.
Rarely I remember that I can use balanced braces. Probably that would be the better choice on most situations, but I forget it...
