I've just finished writing a new framework that will allow us to implement RESTful API's in a simple and reusable way under apache2/mod_perl2.

Here's the google code page (the upload to CPAN is ongoing): apache2rest

This is a beta pre-release, so don't expect a full comprehensive documentation written in perfect english.

I'd like very much to have your suggestions, remarks or patches to make this module better.

UPDATE I started to write a Cook book with the most frequent questions: Apache2::REST Cookbook

Cheers!

Recently I've seen several BioPerl questions (or rather SoPW questions and CB posts where the solution was to use BioPerl), so it may be of interest to some to read brian_d_foys post Testing Needed: Strawberry October 2009 BioPerl, reposted from the BioPerl mailing list.

Martin

Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 development release #22 ("Thousand Oaks")

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the
October 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #22 "Thousand Oaks".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine
(see http://www.parrot.org).  The tarball for the October 2009 release
is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent
addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo
from the latest source, available from the main repository at github.
More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo.

Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code
named after a Perl Mongers group.  The October 2009 is code named
"Thousand Oaks" for their amazing Perl 6 hackathon, their report at
http://www.lowlevelmanager.com/2009/09/perl-6-hackathon.html, and
just because I like the name :-)

Since the 2009-08 release, Rakudo Perl builds from an installed Parrot
instead of using Parrot's build tree.  This means that, unlike previous
versions of Rakudo Perl, the "perl6" (or "perl6.exe") executables only
work when invoked from the Rakudo root directory until a "make install"
is performed.  Running "make install" will install Rakudo and its
libraries into the Parrot installation that was used to build it, and
then the executables will work when invoked from any directory.

This release of Rakudo requires Parrot 1.7.0.

For the latest information on building and using Rakudo Perl, see the
readme file section titled "Building and invoking Rakudo".  (Quick note:
the "--gen-parrot" option still automatically downloads and builds
Parrot as before, if you prefer that approach.)

Some of the specific changes and improvements occuring with this
release include:

* Rakudo is now passing 32,582 spectests, an increase of 17,085 passing
  tests since the September 2009 release.  With this release Rakudo is
  now passing 85.0% of the available spectest suite.

* We have a huge increase in the number of spectests relating to the
  Complex and Rat numeric types.

* Complex numbers are now implemented as a Perl 6 class, and supports all
  trigonometric functions from the specification.

* Rakudo has a new signature binder which makes calling routines
  and operators much faster, and allows binding of positional
  arguments by name.

* Rakudo has improved signature introspection, better errors relating to
  signatures and signature literals are now supported.

* Rakudo now supports accessing outer lexical variables from classes and
  packages.

* Some new variants of the series operator are now implemented.

* When configuring Rakudo with --gen-parrot, the --optimize flag is now
  passed to Parrot's Configure.pl

The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors for
making Rakudo Perl possible.  If you would like to contribute,
see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org
mailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

The next release of Rakudo (#23) is scheduled for November 19, 2009.
A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 is
available in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file.  In general, Rakudo
development releases are scheduled to occur two days after each
Parrot monthly release.  Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month.

Have fun!

Jesse Vincent has announced the release of Perl 5.11.1.

Downloadable here: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.1/

Notable changes in this release:

• Package declarations can now include a version number.
• suidperl is no longer available as part of perl. If your code depends on suidperl, you need to find an alternate solution. (This was actually true as of 5.11.0)
• Over the years a number of language constructs and interpreter features have been deprecated and will eventually be removed. As of this release, Perl enables deprecation warnings by default.
• Perl's tests are now aware of (and work around) a bug in Mac OS X 10.6 locales.
• Support for Windows 95, 98, ME and NT4 has officially ended.

This is the second of the new, regularly-scheduled releases of the 5.11 series. Coming up:

Yves Orton will release Perl 5.11.2 on November 20, 2009.

Leon Brocard will release Perl 5.11.3 on December 20, 2009.

Ricardo Signes will release Perl 5.11.4 on January 20, 2010.

Over on my blog, I've posted a request for method-naming help. I'd love comments from the monastery, as well.

—Theory

jesse, the person currently providing much of the momentum that makes Perl move towards next releases, says:

Turning blead into a stable release of Perl is a lot of work. Doing it well is even more work. As it looks like we're coming to a consensus on a smaller set of changes making it into point releases, it's increasingly important that our .0 releases are well tested, well polished and good enough to run in production.

He needs your help to identify (and potentially write and submit tests for)

• issues that are no longer a problem in current blead
• issues that might block the release of 5.12.0

If you're interested, please read the full post in Want Perl 5.12.0 soon?

OK, so maybe not yet, but moritz blogged about sprixel, "a new Perl 6 compiler in its early stage of development, written in JavaScript and using the standard Perl 6 grammar STD.pm."

To quote from moritz's blog:

Sprixel (an anagram of perlsix) development was initiated by Matthew Wilson, aka diakopter. It traverses the Abstract Syntax Tree as produced by STD.pm, transforms it into an intermediate JavaScript data structure similar to JSON (but with some enhancements to handle cyclic structures), and has a small, continuation based runloop that executes the JavaScript. Currently the only backend is the V8 compiler and virtual machine - but if/when the STD grammar is implemented, you'll be able to run Perl 6 in your browser.

Great work! The future looks brighter already.

pod2.perl.org is intended to be the umbrella for several goals:

• build a community of translators, by writing the guidelines, by sharing experience, resource, tools and so on.
• (of course) do the translations of pods (core and extra) and publish them using POD2:: namespace.
• discuss about a translation platform for pods (by creating a new one or better deciding to use an existing one, without to reinvent the wheel).
• perldoc/Pod::Perldoc improvements.
• publish readable version of translated pods using perldoc.perl.org code.
• promote, more in general, localized Perl documentation.

Have fun with pod2.perl.org!

Best
- Enrico