CPAN6 Project Status
July and August [2007] were mainly spent on promotional activities. A non-Perl centric paper on CPAN6 was prepared and presented on two conferences. The promotional effort took much more time than estimated in the project plan.
Promotion
Mark Overmeer contributions to the YAPC::Europe conference (European Perl Conference, 28-30 August in Vienna Austria, 350 conference participants):
- 60 minutes on CPAN6, introduction and demo;
- 45 minutes on XML::Compile::SOAP, a CPAN6 derivative;
- 45 minutes on Log::Report, another CPAN6 derivative;
- 1 minute lighting-talk to call for language translations of core Perl (not CPAN6 related)
- 30 minutes BoF on CPAN6
At the European Linux Conference (2-5 september in Cambridge England, about 250 participants), he contributed:
- 45 minutes on CPAN6, introduction
The paper and presentation materials are made available via http://cpan6.org and http://perl.overmeer.net.
Most feedback came on the XML work. The CPAN6 ideas are still too abstract to be understood by the average programmer. At the Linux conference, the response was clearly on a higher level than in the Perl community, but this did not lead to any volunteers for the CPAN6 core yet. Four Perl professionals volunteered for the XML SOAP testing, on the other hand.
Implementation
On the implementation side, the effort still focusses on creating the best possible framework to base the CPAN6 implementation on. The XML::Compile message parser was reimplemented fully, just to support the last few (quite rare) remote corners of the Schema specification. Feedback from the community shows that the current behavior is very satisfying.
Work on a new general purpose module has started: Log::Report::View helps document system messages. In various interfaces, you need views on the same text. For instance, a graphical item needs translations, a tool-tip, and a description to be included in a web-page, each translated into various languages. This new Perl module is an attempt to localize these related fragments to avoid mistakes.
Upcoming
For the coming months, less time can be spend on promotion in favor of software development. The target the initial software release still is FOSDEM 2008. The website will be redesigned soon, and a meeting with KDE core developers is planned.