kaare

Tradition tells us to look back and forward when a year turns. And this year I choose to be a traditionalist.

The Past

It's been a remarkable year for me, Work- and Perl Wise. I had the opportunity to work with two great companies with both skilled and devoted coworkers.

And I dived head first into great distributions like

• Dist::Zilla
• Moose
• PSGI
• Mojo
• Catalyst
• DBIx::Class
• XML::Compile
• ... and many more

Not all are from this year, or even new, but they are all great examples of the code quality of CPAN.

I had a short look at Perl 6. Alas there weren't enough time in a year to do share between the exciting stuff in Perl 5 and 6. But next year...

Connectivity

Restful applications are nice and easy to integrate functionality, even internally in a company.

I wrote Catalyst::Model::REST to make it even easier to access other applications through the model layer of Catalyst.

Connectivity also still means Web Services. XML::Compile and friends make live a lot easier if you happen to have to talk to a SOAP server (or be one) and if you've got the WSDL. One project was to write a SOAP server for PSGI. I think it may hit CPAN in 2011.

The Present

One thing I've been looking at is Hierarchical data in PostgreSQL. I aim to revisit this area in 2011, exploring the built-in array type, and probably also the contrib ltree type. Actually, it's something that I've already done a little work on, but I don't have anything intelligent to say about it yet.

Right now I'm making my job queue handler Job::Machine ready for real production. It's been a "nice to have" project for some time, with a couple of special features. Now it's time to tighten the bolts and nuts and deploy. I expect it to be rock solid before we see a 0.20 release.

I'm also working on some other projects, but they are currently not ready for public distribution. I hope to have at least two packages ready in the next year. Not to fill the precious namespace there, but because I need them to solve real world problems.

And that's what I really like about my current situation, solving real problems for real customers. I'd like to think that the people I work for get value for their money.

The Future

This part was originally named "Wishlist". It wasn't my personal TODO list, as experience tells me that I never get to finish items that end up on that kind of list...

My wish as a Perldeveloper is that people will focus even morein 2011 on an IDE for Perl. The talented people working in Padre has got the ideas and skill, but generally, everybody lacks the time. On top of my Padre list is

• Full Screen Debugger.
Working with (web) servers, and all the functionality we've all got used to

• Project Management


• Version Control


• SQL hiliting


• Moose Plugin

Some other projects I've put a "I would like"-sticker om during the last year

• Catalyst::Model::DBIx::Perlish
. DBIx::Perlish is a devilishly clever module.

• Moose WSDL generator
I see that Pod::WSDL seems to be active again, but shouldn't it be possible to write a WSDL file from a Moose class?

• DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader
One thing that I really miss here is the ability to make a DBIC schema that will handle more database schemas.

I wish you all a Happy New Year!