July 2009 Archives

I've got a good deal of work to do on Catalyst::Helpers, so here's a bit of a list on what's coming in the future:

• beat up MooseX::GetOpt add GetOpt::Long functionality

• Trivially moosify Helper.pm and co.

• Hack Makefile.PL of Catalyst dev so that if file::sharedir is installed then it deletes the dist-dir as you do make install

• disallow invalid catalyst project names

• modification of existing code, ie:

  script/myapp_auth.pl --update dsn=dbi:Pg:dbname=hlagh

  , etc.

• TT generation like TTSite with less suck

• Reaction-esque skinning, with a helper. Also, canned skins for download.

• create a default end ActionClass per application

• --minimal option to create bare minimum Catalyst app code (example, for inline test applications)

• make everything less fugly so people can sanely use it (ie, without tearing their eyes out of their sockets)

• create with a given set of modules, ie:

  script/myappcreate.pl local::lib AppName, script/myappcreate.pl MySet::Of::Modules

• "support any sad fool who tried to CPAN something using the old API"

Stay tuned, this list is growing.

I've done a good deal of clean up on the Helper stuff.  Everything has documentation now, and unknown options spit out a "usage" screen nicely.

My next step is to implement http://search.cpan.org/~nuffin/MooseX-App-Cmd-0.05/lib/MooseX/App/Cmd.pm.  That way, we can do things like

use MyApp -run

in the myapp_*.pl scripts.

I've had zero luck thus far, but KiokuDB makes extensive use of this, so I'll be researching that more.

Congratulations to The Perl Foundation's list of students this year participating in t Google Summer of Code.  Eight out of nine of us passed our midterm reviews.  Good work guys :-)

t0m has been working on CatalystX::SimpleLogin, which may or may not completely obsolete the code I've been working on.  This works, and could certainly help me out either way, however: WithRedirect 

Either way, I'll be working on CatalystX::SimpleLogin as there are a few improvements I could help sort out.

I'm working on a "pass through login" type Role for Catalyst (I think that's what I should call it).

The idea looks like this:

package TestApp::Controller::Root;
use Moose;
use namespace::autoclean;
BEGIN { extends 'Catalyst::Controller'; }
with 'CatalystX::RedirectAfterLogin';

sub login : Local {
    my ($self, $c) = @_;
    if ( $c->req->param('username') eq 'blah' ) {
        $c->next_page('success');
    } else {
        $c->res->body('Failed!');
        $c->detach;
    }
}


sub success : Path {
    my ($self, $c) = @_;
    $c->res->body("Success!");

}

This isn't quite working yet. I'm getting some errors with Moose that I can't figure out. Feel free to poke: CatalystX::RedirectAfterLogin

I just upgraded MovableType.  Good, seeing as how I just destroyed my last version :-P

Also, moved it to run under FastCGI.

Perl is a community.  We have some of the greatest minds in the world, and most certainly some of the most creative thinkers.

Google Summer of Code has taken nine of us and given us money to help improve the community which we so love.  Here is my shout out to you all, forever may we kick ass and chew much bubble gum in the perl community, and in the rest of our life journeys!

• Cross-platform Perl Bindings for wxWebKit
• Student: Ryan Jendoubi
• Mentor: Michael Peters

• A prototype LLVM JIT runcore for Parrot
• Kevin Tew 
• Mentor: Allison Randal
  

• HTTP/1.1 Compliance Testing and User-Agent Development for the Mojo Web Framework
• Pascal Gaudette
• Mentor: Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi

• Implement BPSW algorithm as a Perl 5 CPAN module, Math::Primality with extensive test-suite
• Robert Kuo
• Mentor: Jonathan Leto
  

• Decimal Arithmetic: BigInt, BigNum and BigRat for parrot
• Daniel Arbelo Arrocha
• Mentor: Christoph Otto
  

• Refactoring Catalyst helper modules
• Devin Austin
• Mentor: Kieren Diment
  

• Perl 6 end-user documentation tools
  
• Hinrik Sigurdsson
• Mentor: Carl Masak
  

• SQL::Translator rewrite
• Justin Hunter
• Mentor: Ash Berlin
  

• Multimethods for SMOP
• Paweł Murias
• Mentor: Daniel Ruoso
  

Our midterm evaluations have come, and thankfully my mentor marked me as "on par".  I have a few loose ends to tie up before making more progress, but all in all, things are going quite well.

I've made some big strides since start this endeavor. I started this project and the first time I looked at this code I was feeling nearly in over my head.  I pounded away at things, partially out of panic, partially out of being stubborn and knowing that if I wanted to go anywhere in this field I should really get intimate with some production quality code.

I pounded away, and pounded away, getting pushed by wonderful people like Tomas Doran, Kieren Diment, Matt Trout, Jason Kuri, and many many others.  I now feel I'm at a point where I'm a near expert with the C::Helper code, and will soon be able to analyze things and realize what optimizations and feature enhancements can be added on.

I've got a long road ahead yet, but being maintainer of this section of Catalyst is a badge I wear pretty proudly.