use Perl

The 9th German Perl-Workshop will take place from Wednesday, 21 Feb. 2007 to Friday, 23 Feb.2007 and you are invited to submit proposals for talks or tutorials. We will happily accept proposals for interesting talks related to Perl.

The Perl 6 Design Team met on 13 September. Patrick, Allison, Larry, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

This summary has been posted early because I will be going to OSCON Europe on Sunday. Next week's summary will include any threads which were not included this week.

I've written Business-USPS-WebTools to interact with the US Postal Service's Web Tools. This isn't screen scraping; it's a real web service officially offered by the USPS. So far I've only done the Address Information services: Address Standardization, Zip Code Lookup, and City/State Lookup. I didn't use any of the XML modules or anything other yucky things. The requests and responses are very small, and the other side doesn't understand real XML anyway.

"Most version control systems have flexible commit hooks to automatically perform actions" -- Michael G Schwern

"Obi Wan Perforce: This isn't the version control system you were looking for. Move along, move along..." -- John Peacock

This week I participated in the Test Automation Conference hosted by Google in London. They are based just by Victoria Station and have pretty shiny offices indeed with a pool table, table football and lots of little perks like fridges full of Innocent smoothies. This two-day conference really interested me as I'm really interested in large scale testing - as the tshirt we got pointed out: "because life is too short for manual testing".

It's with great pride that the AxKit development team announce AxKit2 version 1.1. We've ironed out all those rough edges. We've built production ready apps with it. We've tested it with bullets (and not just blanks).

So go forth, download, and enjoy. Available in the usual places. May take 24 hours to mirror everywhere (CPAN and Apache mirrors).

"Insistent rumors claim that we used to have Perl compilable with C++ -- I doubt it a bit, given the kind of problems I found when doing this latest cleanup work." -- Jarkko Hietaniemi, having now found a new wall against which to bang his head.

Mark Overmeer gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2006 about cpan6, the design so far is the result of a collaboration between Mark and myself. The talk was generally well received, and during the conference we have heard many more peoples' concerns. The good news is that there were no new requirements that didn't fit cleanly in the design, in fact it gave some people lots of ideas. I think I can say that we have support for the general direction of things, and now we can open up the debate widely, and start implementing pieces.

I invite people to join either the pause6 mailing list (for infrastructure discussions) or the cpan6 tools list (for client-side installers and upload tools).

The earliest task will be looking at the big picture, and seeing which pieces are the low-hanging fruit that we can write tests for straight away. I'll start the ball rolling after we have a few subscriptions.