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
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.
This month, Joel Berger ()
will
give a talk on Perl variable scoping rules, including the my
, our
,
and local
keywords, how they work, and some interesting ways they can
be used.
RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup
page
(EDIT: Slides for Variables, Scoping, and Namespaces are available on
the talks page)
The MetaCPAN hackathon here in
Chicago has come and gone, and those who participated have written about
what they accomplished. All the after-hackathon reports are linked on
the meta::hack page. From our own
members, Doug Bell wrote about his meta::hack
accomplishments
and Joel Berger also wrote about his meta::hack
accomplishments.
Thanks to the sponsors who made meta::hack
happen.
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.