Elegance might seem like a lost trait in programming these days, but it is live and vibrant in Perl. A rather large part of the Test namespace is devoted to providing an elegant way to write "run this code, get the result, compare it with this one".
Today I found myself at a loss of an elegant solution to a problem.
I want to run a set of tests. Theoretically I can write each subset of tests as a Role in a test object (there are atleastthree testing frameworks that allow this nicely) and then run the tests in the object. I can even use MooseX::POE (or regular POE, AnyEvent, Test::Aggregate and the list goes on) to run them asynchronously in order to save the time.
Silly facebook conversation inspired the following:
package UNIVERSAL::Don't; # Because putting things in UNIVERSAL is fun!'
sub don::t {
my ( $proto, $method ) = @_;
my $class = ref $proto // $proto;
my $method = $proto->can($method) or return;
*{"$proto\::$method"} = sub {};
return $method;
}
Just think of how much fun you could have with that ;)
And even though the single quote mark package separator is deprecated, it will be at least a decade before a more strongly worded deprecation notice is added. This, oddly, was inspired by the fact that today at work, I wrote the following package: Don't::Put::Me::In::t::lib:Unless::You::Want::To::Drag::The::Test::Suite::To::A::Screaming::Halt.
And for some reason, this blog is cutting off the rest of that package name, so here it is, broken up: Don't::Put::Me::In::t::lib:Unless::You::Want::To::Drag::The::Test::Suite::To::A::Screaming::Halt
I'm wondering if it's possible to upload a file through scp (ssh). This would be very convenient in the case where SSH keys would be allowed as it wouldn't require users to type in a password (except for the first time that the ssh-aget loads the key).
The Autodia plugin for Padre is currently only version 0.01 and very simplistic, but it does allow you to create, view and save UML class diagrams of your code within Padre..
If you've suffered any problems accessing any of the sites, the databases, the CPAN mirror, etc from the CPAN Testers server last night, please direct your wrath at Microsoft. Last night the msnbot took out the CPAN Testers server with a dedicated denial of service attack. As a consequence measures are now being put in place to completely ban the msnbot from accessing at least the Reports site, and probably all the sites on the server.
Microsoft in their incompetent wisdom decided to unleash 20-30 bots every few seconds. I know this because I can see the IP addresses in the logs. The ones spotted within a few minutes of rebooting the server this morning to clear the processes were:
I recently moved to a new BBC team (if we go down, iPlayer goes down too) and am getting used to working in a different environment with different tools. One issue is that certain tools I'm used to working with are not available (Test::Most being the most noticeable) and getting them added to all environments is a bit bureaucratic (all things considered, shipping new tools should be treated with more caution at many shops than it tends to be). Thus, when I accidentally merged to trunk with a test which contained Test::Most, I was embarrassed.
That's when the rather obvious answer occurred to me. I don't want to accidentally commit use of that module, but it's easy to do. Thus, here's how I do it safely:
So, last blog entry I mentioned Dancer and that I want to use it as CGI (since it's Plack-aware) but I don't know how.
Nick Spacek commented on my entry saying that if it supports Plack/PSGI, there should be an easy way to run it as CGI.
Later that evening I sat down for hummus with my girlfriend (hummus is awesome, ok?). After talking to her about it, I decided to take a minute to check online on my phone if anyone has any explanations on it. In the first 5 results, I found a post Alexis Sukriah (who wrote Dancer!) wrote that same day, regarding my post, showing how to use Plack to run a Dancer app under CGI!
Case in point:
use Plack::Server::CGI;
use Plack::Util;
my $psgi = '/path/to/your/app/app.psgi';
my $app = Plack::Util::load_psgi($psgi);
Plack::Server::CGI->new->run($app);
... and the web server configuration to use it.
(example shown on Alexis' post)
I've released a new version of Cantella::Store::UUID. (git) It features one incompatible change, but I figured it was OK since I'm pretty sure nobody is using it and it is reasonably new. I just couldn't live with having one lone method named so awkwardly. The POD was all updated and improved and two new methods were added, which allow the user to search for files in the storage directory and perform some action on these files. I don't really intend for these methods to be used a lot, since they will take minutes to run on most systems and be incredibly IO-intensive (depth-first search of the entire storage tree, which could be hundreds of thousands of nodes). I use them mainly for maintenance operations and you should probably too.
You know, I really would love to have a heart-to-knife conversation with developers who use complex unless conditions. While trying to tease apart some code, I came across this gem:
To be fair, code grows over time and it's easy to understand how issues like this crop up (and this is a fairly old bit of code), but it took me a while to make sure I understood this. My naive conversion of this to an if statement failed. I had to reduce it down to its simplest components and do a truth table:
Spreadsheet::WriteExcel now supports Area, Bar, Column, Line, Pie, Scatter and Stock chart types. I think that I'll leave it at that for now and concentrate on the sub-types within those charts. Bubbles and Doughnuts and Radar will have to wait untill later. Anyone use those?
For two weeks we've been working hard on defining a rather complex construct of DNS zone files, using multiple servers for multiple domains with cross referencing them and a lot of other complex-sounding terms.
We wrote DNS tests for the zones to make sure all the servers are configured correctly and the general DNS fetching provides correct information. This turned out to be quite difficult.
The original script is 130 lines. This is without taking into account even more testing we wanted. There was a lot of analyzing done which was rather repetitive and the overall code was ugly and not fun to read (to put it in mild terms). I decided to write a testing module for DNS zones - Test::DNS.
Using Test::DNS, we rewrote the script with a lot more options, which we wanted. The resulting script (with the addons) is 20 lines. It's clean and readable.
I started with what I thought would be a simple
Module::Starter
subclass. I wanted to modify Module::Starter::Smart, which knows how
to add a new module to an existing distribution, to properly handle an
existing MANIFEST and MANIFEST.SKIP. I thought I could just
override create_MANIFEST (RT
53339). Once I
overrode that, however, I wanted to make a couple of additional
tweaks, things weren't so easy.
Although I'm using Module::Starter as an example in this post, I
could just as easily use one of my own modules to illustrate the same
thing. I've just been hacking on Module::Starter for the past week
so I can get it into shape for use in the next edition of
Intermediate Perl. I'm not a particular fan of the module, but its
the best place to start if you don't know you want to use something
else.
My problem started when I also wanted to handle some DWIMery in the
--dist command-line parameter:
To any and all recruiters who might stumble across this blog entry, here's a useful tip: be courteous.
I'm not looking for work, but I certainly understand why you contact me on LinkedIn or via referrals. That's how you make your money and while some people I know loathe any contact from you, I shrug it off as a fact of life. I am contacted by enough recruiters that I don't remember all of you, but there is one group of you I strive to remember. The email exchange almost always go like this:
You: I have a great opportunity that I think is perfect for you. Me: I'm not looking for work, but if I were, here are my minimum requirements. You: ... crickets chirping ...
Excuse me? I admit the fact that I'm not looking for work is not appealing to you. I also admit the fact that the "great opportunity" as a junior developer doesn't fit me. I don't, however, accept that you can initiate a conversation and then not so much as acknowledge my reply once you realize that the huge pay cut you tried to entice me with isn't enticing.
I do remember your name and when you contact me again, I'll remind you why I won't do business with you.
I've been upgrading some systems at work recently. Using local::lib so I can test it first without worrying about rolling back being a pain (which it could be with our current build system).
We've had most of our CPAN modules installed for several years and haven't had the need/time to upgrade them. But with the advent of Catalyst 5.8 using Moose and other great projects we'd like to get involved in, such as Gitalist I bit the bullet and started installing into my local::lib so I could then run our tests against it, but then I hit a few problems....
Now remember when I said we had old module? - I'm talking some that haven't been upgraded in 4+ years (they only get upgraded when a newer version is set at a prerequisite).
Our current project at my job is based solely on rather sophisticated object model, we've chosen MooseX::Declare as one of our main helpers. We are very happy with
compiletime
argument checks, I guess it saves us a lot of debugging time.
Unfortunately our app performance was far from satisfying; the profiling showed it was MXD's fault. Also, we found an
enlightening benchmark
.
The problem was solved by implementing a
tool
that allowed us to have two variants of our codebase: development and release.
Release is prepared by translating method declarations with method signatures into plain perl subs with parameters parsing. This job is done by
undeclare.pl
, it uses PPI to parse and transform .pm files.
Some of our domain-specific tests now run more than 10 times faster.
So I hear that the next Perl QA Hackathon will be in Vienna. What should we accomplish? The following is not complete as I was so focused on the areas I was working on that I really didn't follow the other areas.
In the first QA Hackathon, in Oslo, we nailed down a bunch of issues we'd like to see in TAP. We clarified part of the spec and started work on tests for TAP itself. (And convinced Nadim Khemir to release App::Asciio).
The second QA Hackathon, in Birmingham, UK, saw the creation of nested TAP (i.e., subtests).
The third one, I think, should result in either better parsing of nested TAP or shoe-horning structured diagnostics into TAP.
Sometimes a good time means relaxing with CPAN, reading a POD of something and trying to learn it. At least for me.
Last weekend I treated myself to playing with KiokuDB and Dancer. I'll write on KiokuDB later, this post is on Dancer.
Dancer is a Plack-aware web application framework written by Alexis Sukrieh. It has a built-in simple templating system, but supports Template::Toolkit (a must for me), routes handlers (named matching, regex matching, wildcard matching), simple rapid prototyping and support for multiple configurations and allows separate configurations for separate environments and stages of the software.
After playing with it for a rather short time, I already implemented CRUD. The code comes out clean (which I love), understandable and simple. Pure joy. You should totally check it out!
The only problem is that I want to write an interface which will be hosted on someone else's computer, which only supports CGI. I have no idea how to run it as CGI. Any ideas?
Update: Alexis Sukrieh wrote on how to do this here. Next post will reflect this!
