Modern Perl

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