Modern Perl

Perl Catalyst 5.90090 Has Landed

Howdy All,

Those of you that watch CPAN will have noted that Perl Catalyst 5.90090 has landed!  This actually happened a few days ago but I wanted to watch CPAN testers to make sure distribution was stable before telling you all to got ahead and download. it.

This version of Catalyst should continue our tradition of solid backwards compatibility and in general if you code runs on any modern catalyst in the last year or two I would expect no trouble upgrading.  Older versions of Catalyst applications should review the Upgraded and changelog carefully for hints but again I would think any version of Catalyst 5.8xxxxx+ should work fine, although you might need to set a few configuration flags.

The biggest new features is Arg and CaptureArg type constraints.  This allows you to specify a Moose or Type::Tiny type constraint (or list of constraints) in your action attributes:

    sub myaction :Local Args('Int') { ... }

Please see the new Routing documentation in the distribution for more.

We also took the opportunity to move some previously available via plugins extensibility features to core.  You can now 'injection' Catalyst components into your application via configuration, which should save some boilerplate classes.  Also we added into core the ability to declare roles for request, response and statistics classes.  This allows you to more easily modify and add global features to these respective classes.

For now see the primary documentation for more.

Perl Catalyst: 5.90089_003 is Proposed Stable

Hi All.

Last night I finished my regression testing on the current development release of Perl Catalyst (https://metacpan.org/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90089_003/)  This release is looking good from my angle (and the previous 002 release also accumulated a solid passing record on CPAN Testers, leading me to feel the code is starting to shape up).   As a result dev003 is proposed stable.  This means we are not introducing new changes beyond documentation updates unless regression appear.  If none do so I will release this as 5.90090 sometime this week.  If we need to fix bugs we will release a dev004 and start from the beginning ;)

This release is expected to continue to be widely backwards compatible and I would expect all versions of catalyst post 5.8xxxx to run with minimal to no modification, which should mostly require configuration setting changes and following advice in the Catalyst::Upgrading document.  Now is the time to report bugs this version of Catalyst introduces into your code, rather than later when I am chilling out for the summer ;)

 

Perl Catalyst Community Poll and new Development Release!

Morning all,

There's a new poll aimed at the community: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YWGSWLR

Its only eight questions so shouldn't cause you a lot of trouble at work :)  Please take a look.

We also release the second development cut of Perl Catalyst Australorp, which is going to eventually be the 5.9009x stable branch.  The big changes are we tightened up type constraint checking on your args / capture args and we cored a few Catalyst extensibility features previously found only in external modules.  Current development will continue around these bits and I hope to revisit some of the tasks around web API development, since that's a hot topic!

https://metacpan.org/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90089_002

So far this is shaping up to be a pretty stable release but please git it a go on your local code and report issues.

We've also been trying to clear out old issue in the RT bug report for Catalyst.  If you have an old bug report that has been long closed or is no longer relevent please consider logging in and closing it for me:

https://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Name=Catalyst-Runtime

New Stable and Development Releases of Perl Catalyst on CPAN

This week we released Perl Catalyst 5.90085, the fifth installment in the stable 5.9008x branch.  This release continues to focus on providing workarounds for people using unusual or non standard encodings, and are having trouble with all the UTF-8 normalization that Catalyst now does.  5.900.85 added three new configuration settings that allows one to control how the query parameters of the request URI are decoded (or if they are at all).

It also introduces a change in the logic around action chaining so that when there is more than one endpoint matching a request and they all have Args(o) we now follow the general rule of 'last defined action always wins in a tie'.  This change also comes with a configuration setting to revert to the old behavior on the odd chance it causes you trouble.  Read more here: https://metacpan.org/source/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90085/Changes

We also just released the first development version of the next major release of Catalyst, currently codenamed 'Australorp'.  Australorp will focus on improving our ability to express complex request matching in the dispatcher.  For the dev001 release we have added the ability to use a Moose or Type::Tiny type constraint in your Arg or CaptureArg attributes.  For example you can now do:

    package MyApp::Controller::User;

    use Moose;
    use MooseX::MethodAttributes;

    extends 'Catalyst::Controller';

    sub find :Path('') Args(Int) {
      my ($self, $c, $int) = @_;
    }

    __PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;

and GET /user/100 would match but GET /user/string would not.  You may have more than one type constraint (for example Args(Int,Int) ).  Please see the early draft of a new document Catalyst::RouteMatching for more information and examples.

Australorp will focus on issues around this new feature, should they arise and also the plan is to add similar matching for GET query parameters (for example ?page=Int) and POST/PUT Body/BodyData.  

We expect this series to show good backwards compatibility with existing versions of Catalyst, but as always I recommend testing your code on early development branches so that I can get fixes in now, rather than later.

Contribute on Github: https://github.com/perl-catalyst/catalyst-runtime

Enjoy!

Perl Catalyst 5.90080 Released to CPAN!

Good morning Catalyst users!

Today we announce that the Holland development cycle is complete.  Catalyst v5.90080 is now on CPAN.  The only changes from 5.90079_008 are minor documentation changes.  Check it out!

If you've not been following, this release of Catalyst has major changes and improvements in UTF-8 and encoding support.  Going forward Catalyst will encode to the UTF-8 standard by default.  Please review the changelog, Delta and Upgrade docs carefully.

There is now also a new document that overviews UTF-8 and encoding support in Catalyst which is worth a read.

Other noteworthy changes include a new action match subroutine attribute ":Scheme()" that allows you to match your action routes based on if the incoming request meets a certain URI scheme such as HTTPS or WS.  This is supported in $c->uri_for such that if you create a URI object for an action that has a Scheme we use that scheme in the URI, instead of the current request Scheme.  This makes it easier to generate URIs for actions when your application has a mix of allowed Schemes (such as when part of your website is HTTPS and another part HTTP).  See the advent article here for more examples.

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this release.  Its been a bit of a haul to get here, but I think this change is going to help settle issues around encoding going forward.

The upcoming development cycle is codenamed "Australorp".  The current proposed TODO list can be viewed and commented on here.

Jnap

Preliminary Task List for the next Perl Catalyst Development Cycle "Australorp"

Now that the current development cycle is starting to close (barring show stopper bugs we will make the current dev008 release  stable later this week) I want to circulate the current proposed issue list for hacking during the upcoming development burn.

https://github.com/perl-catalyst/catalyst-runtime/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3Aaustralorp

This is a preliminary list and will likely get pared down a bit and the scope of these things could be better defined and narrowed over time but this is as good a place to kick things off as anything else.

Thanks all!

(Another) Final Development release of Perl Catalyst 'Holland' on CPAN

Today I shipped the seventh development release of Perl Catalyst 'Holland':

https://metacpan.org/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90079_007

If you have already been testing dev006 shipped earlier this week you don't need to worry about this one since its nearly all documentation updates.  This release represents updates to documention primarily around UTF8 and encoding.  This is hopefully the final docs we can feel are good enough to ship with stable.  In addition to information in the upgrading pod and inline API level documentation we added a new document Catalyst::UTF8 which expands and corrects the UTF8 and encoding documentation that was published during Advent 2014.  If you read those, this is still worth a look since a few things have changed and this version has more info.  If you didn't read it, you should really read this since it summarizes a ton of information regarding UTF8 and encoding in Catalyst.  In particular if you consider yourself a Unicode kungfu master, please read that document and let me know if you think the underlying concepts are inline with best practices.

There's also more UTF8 tests and a few test corrections that was giving our colleagues using Windows some trouble.  If this continues to pass CPAN testers and I don't hear of any major showstoppers from those of you testing either dev006 or dev007 we expect to ship this as 5.90080 stable on this coming Friday (09 January 2015).

Thanks to everyone that reviewed code and helped me to test this.  I hope this is the best version yet of Perl Catalyst!

Last release of Perl Catalyst development on CPAN; Stable release this Week

Hey All,

Perl Catalyst version 5.90079_006 'Holland' has been on CPAN for a few days and appears to be stable.  In addition I've been checking around and it seems most of the common views and Plugins are ok or have been updated to be good with the new changes.  As a result I am planning to release stable shortly.  If you are testing this development release, or have a plan to do so shortly and would like a bit more time, please shout out.

This version of Catalyst contains big fixups to UTF8 encoding, and also includes changing the default encoding to UTF8.  I think in 2015 this is expected in a modern framework.  Also I have found that without a definative statement on the subject from core, various extensions have tended to go their own way in solving some of these tricky encoding issues.   So having this change in core is hopefully going to make it easier to keep everyone on the same page. It does qualify as a big change, which is why I will say for the last time:

"Please test this and send me your bug reports"!

I'm going to be very discouraged if I get them the week AFTER we take this code to stable.  So complain now or either wait til I have time later to fix your bugs (or you can pay me to fix your bugs).

https://metacpan.org/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90079_006

Perl Catalyst 5.90079 Development 004 "Holland' On CPAN

I'm please to announce the 4th development release in the Perl Catalyst "Holland" branch!

https://metacpan.org/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90079_004

We continue to make changes around encoding and UTF8 to better support existing plugins and existing code.  We also made a first stab at documentation and tried to make using encoding a bit more flexible.  See the full change log:

https://metacpan.org/changes/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90079_004

I am encouraging people to make this a development release you bother to test since the changes to fix UTF8 support are deeper than the average release.  I am targeting January 28, 2015 to make this stable so less than a month to review and get me your feedback!

-- luck, jnap

Development release 001 of Catalyst 5.90080 "Holland" on CPAN

Hey all!

There's a new development release on CPAN which has a ton of fixes and changes around UTF8 and encoding.  Amongst these changes are te fact UTF8 encoding is enabled by default, which is a proposed change still subject to reversing if it turns out to be too painful.

https://metacpan.org/release/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90079_001

If you never bother to test development releases of Catalyst, this is the one time you really should.  I expect this dev cycle to remain elongated compared to the ones in the recent past given the depth of refactoring here.  

Although the bulk of the changes are around UTF8 and encoding there's a few other tweaks, including a new dispatcher mathing rule 'Scheme' that lets you match actions based on the URL scheme (for example to require an action to be HTTPS).

If you are a CPAN author that supports bits in the extended Catalyst ecosystem I recommend testing as well.

Happy holidays!

jnap