Morpheus - ultimate configuration engine
As I promised, here are the slides from my talk this morning at Saint Perl-2 in Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
I believe Morpheus can be very useful for the community and hope that it'll become widely adopted.
There are still a lot of things which can be added, but conceptually we are on the right track.
These slides probably suck (I wrote them in the last moment and didn't put enough details in some places), but putting code out in the wild and getting feedback is more important by now.
One more thing, if you're going to check out PODs in next few days, see them on github instead of CPAN. There are much more of them added in 0.36 release, which is not uploaded to CPAN yet.
UPD: Just found out that 0.36 release docs can be viewed here: http://search.cpan.org/~mmcleric/Morpheus-0.36/
Morpheus::Key, Morpheus::Bootstrap and Morpheus::Plugin::Content PODs are worth to be looking at, if you are interested in implementation detals.
I wrote Ubic. I worked at Yandex for many years, and now i'm building my own startup questhub.io (formerly PlayPerl). I'm also working on Flux, streaming data processing framework.
CPAN ID: MMCLERIC.
Nice, but please distribute this under the Config namespace. Creating unnecessary top-level namespaces is almost as annoying as ruby-like "cutesy" names.
Are 'Moose', 'Starman', 'POE' and 'AnyEvent' bad names too?
Yes, they are, especially "Moose" and "Starman," which are cute without conveying any information. I don't care about using up our "precious and non-renewable top-level namespace resources," but a cute name makes your module harder to find, and makes it harder to line up all the various reinventions of the configuration wheel.
I don't believe having Config:: prefix is worth it in this case.
Nobody uses cpan/modules/by-category/, and search.cpan.org searches by description too.
Most of the time people find out about modules not by using search but by hearing about them from blogs, irc or other people's code, anyway.
(Of course I'm also biased and believe that Morpheus is "the only true way" to deal with configs and everyone should use it :) )
For what it's worth, the top level name thing doesn't bother me at all. CPAN namespacing is a pretty loose taxonomy and it probably doesn't really help with organization or finding things so much.
I'm more concerned that when I saw this pop up on CPAN when I glanced through the docs and synopsis example, as compared to the presentation linked above, I had a very different understanding of the project. Maybe you shouldn't promote the symbol importer so heavily, since glancing threw it that's all I saw and all I thought it was.
john
Yeah, I know, synopsis is pretty confusing by now.
http://search.cpan.org/~mmcleric/Morpheus-0.36/lib/Morpheus.pm"0.36 version docs are much better, and we'll try to think about how it can be improved further.
Maybe we should remove importer example altogether and add some provider-side examples instead (but I don't want to scare any potential users off by showing them examples of complicated configs in Perl from the first moment).
I usually giggle at unintuitively-named modules and then ignore them, like I first did with Moose. When they become popular, I take a second look. But if enough people behave the same, you lose potential momentum. Any traditionally-name module, however, I take seriously and look at the docs, as well as look at the list of other modules the author has written. Unless the project is well-known, the module name should be self-documenting, i.e. it should fall under a namespace. I don't want to have to explain to my coworkers why I'm using some new module named Remulak or Thong or Neptune, etc.
I think the important difference here is between "modules" and "projects". For projects, i.e. pieces of software which are developing rapidly and have an active community, having a short name is actually an advantage from the marketing point of view.
I don't believe that "cute" names ever hurt any modules, looking at how successful Moose, Dancer, Mojo, Catalyst and others are. In my (very limited) open-source experience, the only way to attract attention to the new module is to promote it in blogs / IRC / mailing lists / conferences. Definitely not uploading it on CPAN and hoping that anyone will notice...
BTW, "Morpheus" is not a *completely* random name :) It's derived from "morph", which hints at the hash-merging aspect of core functionality.
For what it's worth - I named WebNano WebNano - so that it can be googled for, but Google improved much since last time I checked - and for example Web::Simple is first result when searching for it.