Memoirs of a Roadie

Ultraviolet (Light My Way)

Posted on 28th February 2011

Last week I gave my first technical talk for several months. Despite being a bit rusty, everyone seemed to find the talk interesting. The talk itself was about code I'd written to test XHTML completeness of web pages and further pattern matching of page content. I've been using and developing the testing code over the last few years, having written the initial basic script, xhtml-valid, back in 2008. Over the last 18 months I have revisited the code and rewritten it into a traditional Perl testing structure. The talk looked at the current state of the code and asked for advice on where to take it next.

The code has developed into two packages, Test::XHTML and Test::XHTML::Valid, and as such the talk naturally fell into two parts, looking at each package in more depth. I had originally planned a demo, but unfortunately my laptop wouldn't talk to the projector, so had to rely on slides alone. This didn't seem to matter too much, as the slides conveyed enough of the API to give a decent flavour of what the packages were about.

The final questions I asked originally centred on where I was thinking of heading with the code base, but I also got asked a few questions regarding the technical aspects. My thanks to Colin Newell and Nick Morrott for giving me some ideas and pointers for further expansion of the code. As for my final questions, it was generally agreed that these should appear on CPAN in some form, and as two separate packages, but unfortunately nobody had a suitable name for either.

I plan to work further on the code, both to package them better and to include the suggestions from Colin and Nick, and then I'll see if anyone has some better suggestions for the names. In the meantime, the slides are now online [1] and the 2008 version 1.00 of the code base is also available [2]. I aim to have the current code base online soon, with a GitHub repo to provide ongoing developments for anyone who might be interested.

[1] http://birmingham.pm.org/talks/barbie/text-xhtml
[2] http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk/page/code

Some Heads Are Gonna Roll

Posted on 11th February 2011

Some time ago I wrote Test-YAML-Meta. At the time the name was given as a compliment to Test-YAML-Valid, which validates YAML files in terms of the formatting, rather than the data. Test-YAML-Meta took that a step further and validated the content data for META.yml files included with CPAN distributions against the evolving CPAN META Specification.

With the release of Parse-CPAN-Meta I wrote Test-CPAN-Meta, which dropped the sometimes complex dependency of the more verbose YAML parsers, for the one that was specifically aimed at CPAN META.yml files. With the emergence of JSON, there was a move to encourage authors to release META.json files too. Although considered a subset of the full YAML specification, JSON has a much better defined structure that has more complete parser support. Coinciding with this move was the desire by David Golden to properly define a specification for the CPAN Meta files. It was agreed that v2.0 of the CPAN Meta Specification should use JSON as the default implementation. As a consequence I then released Test-JSON-Meta.

Although the initial naming structure seemed the right the thing at the time, it is becoming clearer that really the names need to be revised. As such I looking to change two of the distributions to better fit the implementations. So in the coming weeks expect to see some updates. The name changes I'm planning are:

• Test-CPAN-Meta => Test-CPAN-Meta (no change)
• Test-YAML-Meta => Test-CPAN-Meta-YAML
• Test-JSON-Meta => Test-CPAN-Meta-JSON

Underneath these current namespaces is the Version module that describes the data structures of the various specifications. In the short term these will also move, but will be replaced by a dependency on the main CPAN-Meta distribution in the future. There will be final releases for Test-YAML-Meta and Test-JSON-Meta, which will act as a wrapper distribution to re-point the respective distributions to their new identities.

Long Live Rock'n'Roll

Posted on 9th February 2011

On the 1st January 2011, I released the first Open Source version of Labyrinth, both to CPAN and GitHub. In additon I also released several plugins and a demo site to highlight some of the basic functionality of the system.

Labyrinth has been in the making since December 2002, although the true beginnings are from about mid-2001. The codebase has evolved over the years as I've developed more and more websites, and got a better understanding exactly what I would want from a Website Management System. Labyrinth had the intention of being a website in a box, and although it's not quite there yet, hopefully once I've released all the plugin code I can put a proper installation tool in place.

Labyrinth now is the backend to several Open Source websites, CPAN Testers using it for the Reports, Blog, Wiki and Preferences sites, as well as some personal, commercial and community projects. As a consequence Labyrinth has become stable enough to look at growing the plugins, rather than the core code. I'm sure there is plenty that could be done with the core code, but for the moment providing a good set of plugins, and some example sites are my next aims.

As mentioned, I see Labyrinth as a Website Management System. While many similar applications and frameworks provide the scaffolding for a Content Management System, Labyrinth extends that by not only providing the ability to manage your content, but also to provide a degree of structure around the functionality of the site, so the management of users and groups, menu options and access, as well as notification mechanisms, enable you to provide more control dynamically.

When writing the fore-runner to Labyrinth, one aspect required was the ability to turn on and off functionality instantly, which meant much of the logic flow was described in the data, not the code. Labyrinth has built on this idea, so that the dispatch tables and general functionality can be controlled by the user via administration screens, and not by uploading new code. When I started looking at this sort of application back in 2001, there was nothing available that could do that. Today there are several frameworks written in Perl that potentially could be tailored to process a website in this way, but all require the developer to design and code the functionality. Labyrinth aims to provide that pre-packaged.

I'm primarily releasing Labyrinth so that I can release all the code that drives the CPAN Testers websites. Giving others the ability to better suggest improvements and contribute. The system allows me the freedom to build websites quickly and easily, with the hardwork being put into the design and CSS layouts. With so many other frameworks available, all of which have bigger development teams and support mechanisms than I can offer, I'm not intending Labyrinth to be a competitor. It might interest some, which is great, but if you prefer to work on other frameworks that's great too. After all it's still Perl ;)

More news of plugins and sites being released coming soon.