August 2007 Archives
A year ago at YAPC::NA 2006 in Chicago, I sat down w/Michael Schwern and we decided we needed to scrap Test::Harness 2.x and its ancient origins. Fourteen months later, primary hackers Curtis Poe and Andy Armstrong will be releasing Test::Harness 2.99_01. It's based on the new TAP::Parser module, and is meant to be a development release for those who want to poke at what will become Test::Harness 3.0.
Michael Peters' Smolder is a web-based test runner and aggregator, and it uses the new TAP::Parser as well. This will help the Test::Harness 3.0 project get its innards tested, and gives Smolder a solid foundation to build on.
I'm looking into using Smolder at the day job as the testing bot, instead of our homegrown bot, for a website I've taken over and that needs plenty of .t-file goodness. Readers' comments about Smolder will be appreciated.
My text-finding utility ack has just seen its 1.66 release. It's available on the ack homepage or by installing App::Ack from the CPAN shell.
The features in 1.66 include the -1 switch, which makes ack stop at the first result it finds, and the --passthru switch, which lets ack's color-highlighting work when filtering output from a file, such as when tailing a log file. Also, the -o and --output options now print all matches, not just the first from each line.
There's work behind the scenes, too. Gabor Szabo is working on a windowed version of ack called wack, and I've worked with him to make ack's internals more modular and more overloadable so that ack can run in a GUI environment. I'm excited to see what Gabor comes up with!
ack has a mailing list for users to share requests and ideas about enhancing ack. Find the sign-up form on the ack homepage.
Curtis "Ovid" Poe is working on PPI-based source code grepping. An early release is available from CPAN.
Scott Lanning reports the first major release of Bricolage, the enterprise-class content management system, in about a year. Download or read the Changelog on Sourceforge.
hio has translated the JSON::XS docs into Japanese.
- Work on stub pages. These are pages which are very incomplete and only include bare bones information. Lots of low hanging fruit here.
- Tag more pages as "stubs".
- Add to the glossary and fill in what pages haven't been written yet.
Dan Horne recently created CGI::Application::Plugin::RequireSSL, an easy way to add additional security to any web application.. CAP::RequireSSL forces the usage of SSL in CGI::Application-derived web applications in one of two ways: by raising an error when an application is accessed without SSL protection, or it can automatically redirect the browser to the same spot in the application, but over HTTPS rather than HTTP.
George Hartzell recently contributed Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGIApp to the Perl community. TWM::CGIApp is a subclass of Test::WWW::Mechanize that makes it easy to instantiate and test CGI::Application-based webapps.
And finally, Mark Stosberg has helped fill a void in the CGI::Application development toolset by releasing two related pieces of infrastructure to the project:
- CGI::Application::Dispatch::Server provides a simple Perl-based web server for fast, lightweight development of CGI::Application-based webapps. It can cleanly and easily dispatch requests to the appropriate
web app during the development process, without
the need for Apache, mod_rewrite, or regular expressions.
- Test::WWW::Selenium::CGIApp makes it easy to develop and test offline by eliminating the need for Apache during the development cycle.
