Test Environments for Modern Web Apps

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This month, William Lindley ( blog) will talk about writing a test harness for modern Perl programs using Test::More, Test::Mojo for the API, and DBIx::TempDB for the database.

Building, testing, and deploying actual systems is more complex than merely writing a program. Real testing often needs to be done against databases of known large or problematic datasets. A test environment cannot affect production data. Staging even minor changes, so we can preview and find errors before moving to production servers, can prevent expensive errors. The "best practices" in this field are relatively new and still changing, and we look at the first steps from "I built this mockup last night" by building the test suite for a simple database-driven file-upload service with Mojolicious.

William Lindley has been hacking computers (in the good sense) since 1977, a database advocate since dBase II and PostgreSQL-predecessor Ingres in the 1980s, a Perl monger since 1994, and a free-software promoter since first getting Linux to run XWindows in 1995.

If time permits, Doug Bell (preaction) () will show a simple app to mock JSON REST APIs for testing using Mojolicious.

RSVP for the meeting on the Chicago.PM Meetup

Perl 6 Grammars and Logging in Perl 5

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This month, we have a special meeting: brian d foy () will be giving a talk about Perl 6 Grammars on Thursday, February 16. Grammars in Perl 6 are the evolved form of Perl 5 regular expressions that allow even more power and flexibility, while still being easier to use. RSVP for this special talk about Perl 6 Grammars on the Chicago.PM Meetup.

For our regular meeting, Doug Bell (preaction) () will be giving a talk about Logging for Programs Tiny and Large. It will cover various ways to add logging and reporting to your Perl programs, including built-ins like warn, core modules like Sys::Syslog, and CPAN modules like Log::Any and Log::Log4perl. RSVP for the talk about Logging in Perl 5 on the Chicago.PM Meetup.

We also need speakers for March and further on the rest of the year. If you're interested in talking for 20 minutes or 40 minutes about any topic at least tangentially related to developing software with Perl, e-mail me or sign-up on our spreadsheet. If you'd like to contribute, but don't know what to talk about, check out our list of talk ideas.

MetaCPAN Hackathon in Chicago

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Olaf Alders has announced meta::hack, a MetaCPAN hackathon in Chicago. MetaCPAN is the best place to search for CPAN modules, and includes lots of useful information like documentation, links to the source repository and bug tracker, and a summary of CPAN Testers results.

Much like the Perl QA Hackathon, this event will get the core MetaCPAN team together to achieve a few targeted goals. The biggest current goal is to get the platform upgraded to ElasticSearch version 2, but other, smaller tasks may come up as well.

If you can help, sponsor the meta::hack hackathon. Sponsorship will help pay for travel expenses for the team so they can concentrate on making MetaCPAN better.