What's new on CPAN August 2014

Sep 2, 2014 by David Farrell

Welcome to “What’s new on CPAN”, a curated look at last month’s new CPAN uploads for your reading and programming pleasure.

APIs

• Appium provides the Perl bindings for the open source mobile testing framework
• Net::Stripe::Simple is a lightweight interface to Stripe’s API
• WebService::MorphIO is an API for morph.io “the heroku for web scrapers”
• New music APIs: WebService::Bandcamp and WebService::MusixMatch

Apps

• Looking for book deals? App::BarnesNoble::WishListMinder monitors a wishlist of books for price changes
• App::CPANRepo is handy utility that returns the source URL of a given module name
• App::mirai is an impressive-looking debugger for future programming
• The Unix which program returns only one matching binary. Enter App::multiwhich which helpfully returns all matching binaries for a given search (edit: the author has blogged recommending File::Which instead)

Async & Concurrency

• Event::Distributor implements an in-process (synchronous) pub / sub model - it’s early days but looks interesting
• AnyEvent::Future provides a future object for concurrent programming with the popular AnyEvent module

Data

• Bloom::Scalable is a scalable bloom filter implementation - a probabilistic dataset that saves space
• Search complex Perl data structures with Data::Seek
• Working with non UTC datetimes? DateTimeX::Period provides a safe cross-timezone implementation of DateTime methods
• Variable::Disposition helps you forcibly dispose of variables

Config & System Administration

• IOD (“INI On Drugs”) is a new configuration file format inspired by INI
• Alternatively you prefer to use Perl hashrefs as config files with Config::FromHash
• For a bare-bones fork interface, have a look at IPC::Open2::Simple

Fun

• Happy CPAN day! Acme::Cake returns a jpeg of a CPAN cake
• Games::FrogJump is a cool ASCII terminal game. A bit primitive but it shows what’s possible
• On the other hand, Games::Hangmanis incredibly addictive and feature complete
• If you need a list of English proverbs and phrases check out Games::Word::Phraselist::Proverb::TWW

Hardware

• Big developments on the hardware front: Device::WebIO provides a standardized interface for hardware devices including Arduino, PCDuino and Raspberry Pi
• Device::BusPirate provides an interface for the Bus Pirate hardware electronics debugging device
• How cool is this: Device::Gembird let’s you control the voltage on a Gembird surge protection device with Perl

Language & International

• Unicode::Security provides interesting features including a function to determine if two Unicode strings are visually confusable
• Unicode::Block enables you to take a character and iterate through the entire block of Unicode characters to which it belongs

Object Oriented

• Gloom is a dependency-free new OO library released a couple of months back
• Anonymous objects are an intriguing idea: Object::Anon is an embryonic implementation, the author is looking for feedback

Testing & Exceptions

• Conveniently get the test coverage results of a CPAN distribution with CPAN::Cover::Results
• Configure your Pod coverage testing with Test::Pod::Coverage::Configurable a new Dist::Zilla plugin
• Throw structured exception objects with the cleverly-named Throw::Back

Update: reference to App::multiwhich updated following correspondence from the author. 2014-09-05

This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.