This month, Doug Bell, Joel Berger, and Eric Johnson will be giving short demonstrations of tools to manage Perl distributions. A distribution is an installable bundle of modules, usually uploaded to CPAN for others to download.

Doug will be presenting Dist::Zilla, the 500-lb gorilla of dist management. Joel will presenting Module::Build and Module::Build::Tiny with App::ModuleBuildTiny. Finally, Eric will be presenting Minilla and Carton.

Each talk with take about 20 minutes, with some extra time for questions.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

This month, Joel Berger will be giving a talk on testing Javascript from Mojolicious

Do you test your Javascript? All of it? Be honest. I thought so, neither did I.

It is very easy to say that testing Javascript is too hard, or that you don't need to because you have so little of it. But what if testing your client-side Javascript was as easy as testing a Mojolicious app, which is pretty darn easy? Would you do it then?

In this talk I will demonstrate Test::Mojo::Role::Phantom, which allows testing a Mojolicious app, PSGI app or even external website's client-side Javascript. It only requires the phantomjs executable, which is a piece of cake to install. You'll be testing your browser behavior in no time!

Doors open at 6:45. Meeting starts at 7:00. RSVP on the Meetup page

This month, Mike Schienle will talk about reading and writing Excel spreadsheets from Perl, with the main focus on writing them. The presentation will discuss writing both data and formulas, multiple sheets, adding comments, etc. Mike uses Excel in both his day job as an ETL geek for Northern Trust and processing weather data.

Doors open at 6:30pm. Meeting starts at 7:00pm. RSVP for Excel Spreadsheets with Perl on the Chicago.PM Meetup.

This month's office hours will be on June 11. RSVP for office hours on the Chicago.PM Meetup

(EDIT: Slides from the talk have been added to the talks page)

You may have heard that Perl 6 is making its debut this Christmas; This is the perfect time to get involved and help the team get through the last mile. Rob Hoelz will walk through making a change to the Rakudo compiler, which will make it easier to make your own changes and help out! A brief rundown of the evening:

• A quick intro to Perl 6 for newbies
• A brief overview of the Perl 6 ecosystem
• A tour of the Rakudo compiler's source
• Going through the compiler and making the change

Join us on Thursday, May 28 at 7:00 PM. RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup page

If you've got Perl problems, questions, or just want to meet fellow Perl programmers, come to Office Hours on Thursday, May 14. RSVP for Office Hours on the Chicago.PM Meetup page

(EDIT: Slides have been added to the talks page)

This month, Doug Bell will be giving a talk on the DBIx::Class ORM library. DBIx::Class automates the tedium of writing SQL, and makes it easier to build more portable and reusable database models.

Examples will be given for an ETL job reporting database with an accompanying web application.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup page

(edit: The FFI::Platypus talk will be given another time)

(update: The slides for the Introduction to DBIx::Class talk are now available on the talks page)