Rakudo Star is the first usable Perl 6 distribution

Yesterday the first Perl 6 distribution was released. It’s named Rakudo Star:

Rakudo Star is aimed at “early adopters” of Perl 6. We know that it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren’t implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These “Star” releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo’s implementation of it.

If you’re interested to play with Perl 6 practically you may download the Rakudo Star here. Sure it isn’t stable and cannot be used in the real projects. But as the first step to Perl 6 it looks perfect.

Trick with variable name transformation in CakePHP

CakePHP is a good PHP MVC framework. You can study it easily and start developing web sites very fast. But it has some disadvantages, of course. One of them is strange rules for transformation variable name when it set in the controller. Statement

$my_var = 'Hello world!';
$this->set('my_var', $my_var);

will make the variable $my_var accessible in your view:
<?php echo $my_var; ?>
The phrase ‘Hello world!’ should appear on the web page. But if the same operation is done using function compact, the result is not predictable:
$my_var = 'Hello world!';
$this->set(compact('my_var'));

Instead of ‘Hello world!’ you’ll see the warning about undefined variable on your web page. It happens because cakePHP removes underscore and makes letter, followed by it, capital. So, instead of $my_var you should use $myVar in the view:
<?php echo $myVar; ?>

Note that this bug appears in the cakePHP version 1.2. It’s already fixed in the 1.3.

Improve Your Perl Programming

Brian Foy – the author of Mastering Perl and one of the famous perlmonks, wrote an article on the ONLAMP where described five ways to improve Perl programming:

  • Cleaning up your code – I also hate to read unformatted code -without tabs, proper style etc.
  • Use configuration – sure, my favorite module – Config::General.
  • Logging – log4perl should be used in all your applications.
  • Persistence – Brian suggested to use Storable or DBM::Deep but I prefer to use Cache::FileCache (it’s used in my module IMDB::Film to cache already retrieved web content).
  • Subclasses for applications – it’s good practice to implement a common functionality in the modules instead of keeping it in your script. This approach allows to have more structured application and reuse the same functionality in some other scripts.

So, generally I didn’t find anything new for me in those recommendations. I just confirmed my own point of view 🙂