Modern Perl

Update on the Status of Catalyst 'zombie-boomstick' Release

Hey All,

So this is the last solid week for March and you might be wondering about the status of the next Catalyt release.  There's some ups and downs, based on the goal list over on Play Perl:

Ups

-- support for Travis continous developement is in solid progress, we expect to finish it this week (thanks ChrisW)

- Body paser and other working prototypes is well on the way, and I expect to finish the working code for this and have a blog review of it for first week April (sneak peek for people that like to look at code over here)

-- broken FCGI logging for PSGI is commited!  (omega++)

-- Bonus extra fixes for documention and support for cpanfile!

Downs

-- Moving Unicode plugin to code (undone, no owner)

-- removing Regexp dispatch types (undone, no owner)

-- Improve content negotiation (undone, no owner)

Of the three, numbers 1 and 3 seem the most popular (at least by the play perl voting).  However I myself don't have time to do them this week (my boss reads my blog so he's going to know if I'm spending all my time Catalyst hacking :) ).  Tasks 1 and 2 are really straightforward and I think great value.  If you want to step up, I can garentee you great mentorship on it.  Feel free to hack on this with a github fork, or whatever and find us on IRC for help.  (or comments, whatever)

Although the content negotation task is popular, I think perhaps it was a bit of a reach.  Right now I think let's retask it to at least settle on what the API for that would be.  One suggestion is to simple core the stuff in Catalyst::Action::REST for example.  The API's of other frameworks might be worth lookig at.  If anyone is interested and wants to start a document listing the options, that would move us forward.

Regardless, we will release Catalyst first week of April.  The version number will depend on if we manage to remove regexp/core unicode, since that's a bigger jump, and we might want to leave space for people to fix bugs when they can't make the leap.

Play Perl Catalyst Quests

Catalyst on Github

Catalyst TODO example (prototypes for possible future versions of Catalyst)

There's still time to jump in and get your name on the contributors list :)

Quick Update on Catalyst Github Organization

Hey All,

So last week I mentioned that we have the Catalyst repository mirrored out to Github and it was considered open for people to hack on, particular anyone that wanted to work on tasks related to zoombie-boomstick, the targeted March release of Catalyst.

A quick check this morning I noted 74 Stars anf 15 forks of the branch.  So that's a good start!  More excitingly I noticed at least one pull request related to a task on the play Perl backlog.  Even better.

Starring and Forking on Github has a nice side effect in that (for better or worse) its one metric of popularity.  I've never seen Githup pimp a Perl project on their home page, since they only do that to projects that are considered popular by the metrics they care about.  So even if right now you are not sure if there's something you can work on, go ahead a fork and star away and lets see if we can get noticed!

Catalyst 'zombie-boomstick' branch on Github for your Coding Fun!

Hello gentle readers. Thanks to some help from Matt Trout we finally have the Catalyst Github Organization up and running and it syncs from the canonical git system managed by Shadowcat. Here's the relevant links:

Catalyst on ShadowGit

Catalyst on the Github Organization

Now, here's the chance for all of you that said, "If only Catalyst was on Github we'd get uber contributions."  I've made a branch for the next targeted release of Catalyst, called 'zombie-boomstick'.  You can see the branch on Github over here:

Catalyst 'zombie-boomstick'

Free free to fork away and send pull request TO THE BRANCH.  If you make the effort I will do the work of syncing it over to the canonical repo on Shadowgit myself.  Here's our intended backlog for this release, over on play-perl where you can trivially make an account, comment, discuss, disagree or just minimally give a thumbs up to stuff you like:

Play Perl Backlog for zombie-boomstick

As you can read, we've set some small goals here and my intention is this is stuff we should release in March (2013).  On the other hand, if I have to do it all myself, make it 2014.  So, if you really want to see Catalyst evolve and remain relevent, here it is on Github and here's a public backlog were you can look and ask questions and get involved.  No thought is too silly, no question irrelevent.  You have more to offer than you might believe.  So, lets get to it!

 

Catalyst Backlog for Next Release on Play Perl

I've pared down my thoughts on what we can rationally do for the next release of Catalyst, and I've taken advantage of the new Play Perl website to put them in a public place:

http://play-perl.org/player/jnap

Its really, really easy to log in here and comment or to vote up a task.

These are my proposals but I really need some community buy in, either in the form of discusion or thumbs up votes.  Otherwise I have no reason to think these are changes that have broad backing.  So if you want to help move Catalyst along, this is a cheap and easy way to do so (it gets no easier than doing a thumbs up, and leaving a comment takes just a few more seconds).

So go look.  Now!