Just a Theory

Tutorial on GitHub

Following a very good suggestion from Pedro Melo, I've created a Git repository for this tutorial and put it on GitHub. I replayed each step, making each into its own commit, and tagged the state of the code for each entry:

My Catalyst Tutorial: Add Authors to the View

Another post in my ongoing series of posts on using Catalyst with Template::Declare and DBIx::Connector. This will be the last post covering material from chapter 3, I promise. This is a fun one, though, because we continue to use this really nice DSL called “SQL,” which I think is more expressive than an ORM would be.

pgTAP Best Practices Slides Available

Last month I gave two presentations at the PostgreSQL Conference West. The first was a variation on Unit Test Your Database!, which I've now given about six times (and will at least two more times, including tomorrow night for Portland PLUG and in two weeks at the JPUG 10th Anniversary Conference). The second was a new talk, a 90-minute tutorial, called “pgTAP Best Practices.” And here it is, published on Slideshare. Enjoy.

Create a Template::Declare Wrapper

Next in my ongoing series of posts on using Catalyst with Template::Declare and DBIx::Connector, we pick up again in chapter 3 to create a wrapper for the view. I added the wrapper support to Template::Declare over a year ago, and while the idea is sound, the interface makes it feel like it’s bolted on. See if you agree with me.

Catalyst with DBIx::Connector and Template::Declare

Following up on my post yesterday introducing Catalyst::View::TD, today I'd like to continue with the next step in chapter 3 of the Catalyst tutorial. The twist here is that I'm going to use PostgreSQL for the database back-end and start introducing some database best practices. I'm also going to make use of my DBIx::Connector module to interact with the database.

Create Catalyst Views with Template::Declare

Following up on last week’s release of Template::Declare 0.41, this week I'm pleased to announce the release of a new Catalyst view class, Catalyst::View::TD.

Pg::Priv Hits CPAN (Thanks Etsy!)

Earlier this year, I was working on an administrative utility for Etsy that validates PostgreSQL database permissions. Of course, in order to verify that permissions were correct or needed updating, I had to have a way to examine PostgreSQL ACLs, which are arrays made of of strings that look like this:

Template::Declare Explained

Today, Sartak uploaded a new version of Template::Declare. Why should you care? Well, in addition to the nice templating syntax, the new version features complete documentation. For everything.

Pod::Simple 3.09 Hits the CPAN

I spent some time over the last few days helping Allison fix bugs and close tickets for a new version of Pod::Simple. I'm not sure how I convinced Allison to suddenly dedicate her day to fixing Pod::Simple bugs and putting out a new release. She must've had some studies or Parrot spec work she wanted to get out of or something.

DBIx::Connector Updated

After much gnashing of teeth, heated arguments with @robkinon and @mst, lots of deep thesaurus spelunking, and three or four iterations, I finally came up with an an improved API for DBIx::Connector that I believe is straight-forward and easy to explain.

Suggest Method Names for DBIx::Connector

Thanks to feedback from Tim Bunce and Peter Rabbitson in a DBIx::Class bug report, I've been reworking DBIx::Connector's block-handling methods. Tim's objection is that the the feature of do() and txn_do() that executes the code reference a second time in the event of a connection failure can be dangerous. That is, it can lead to action-at-a-distance bugs that are hard to find and fix. Tim suggested renaming the methods do_with_retry() and txn_do_with_retry() in order to make explicit what's going on, and to have non-retry versions of the methods.

Database Handle and Transaction Management with DBIx::Connector

As part of my ongoing effort to wrestle Catalyst into working the way that I think it should work, I've just uploaded DBIx::Connector to the CPAN. See, I was using Catalyst::Model::DBI, but it turned out that I wanted to use the database handle in places other than the Catalyst parts of my app. I was bitching about this to mst on #catalyst, and he said that Catalyst::Model::DBI was actually a fork of DBIx::Class's handle caching, and quite out of date. I said, “But this already exists. It's called connect_cached().” I believe his response was, “OH FUCK OFF!”

Unicode Normalization in SQL

I've been peripherally aware of the need for unicode normalization in my code for a while, but only got around to looking into it today. Although I use Encode to convert text inputs into Perl's internal form and UTF-8 or an appropriate encoding in all my outputs, it does nothing about normalization.

Keep DBI's connect_cached From Horking Transactions

I've been on a bit of a Perl hacking tear lately. In addition to knocking out Test::XPath last week, I've been experimenting with TAP::Harness sources, Template::Declare, Catalyst views, a new Module::Build subclass for building database-backed applications, and, last but not least, an IRC logging bot. Oh, and that application I'm working on for PGX with Quinn Weaver. So much is crowding my mind these days that I'm having trouble sleeping. Tonight I'm up late hacking to try to get some of this stuff out of my head.

Use Rubyish Blocks with Test::XPath

Thanks to the slick Devel::Declare-powered PerlX::MethodCallWithBlock created by gugod, the latest version of Test::XPath supports Ruby-style blocks. The Ruby version of assert_select, as I mentioned previously, looks like this: