What's new on CPAN - January 2015

Feb 6, 2015 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. This year we’re running a new feature: “module of the month”, where we highlight our favorite new CPAN upload. Enjoy!

Module of the month

FFI::Platypus enables Perl to call foreign language functions (e.g. Python, C, Rust) using libffi. Unlike using XS, no knowledge of C is required. The module not only works great but has comprehensive documentation and is under active development.

Module author Graham Ollis has also blogged about it. FFI::Platypus is hosted on GitHub, check it out!

APIs & Apps

• Easily share files over HTTP with charon
• App::PerlXLock will lock the screen when run. Requires X11
• Need to serve a directory over HTTP? Check out App::SimpleHTTPServer
• App::SpeedTestis cool command line utility for testing connection speeds
• It comes with warnings but Google::Tasks looks like a useful API

Config & DevOps

• MetaCPAN::Helper provides some high-level sugar for searching MetaCPAN
• Shell::Tools imports an arsenal of convenient modules for scripting
• App::RemoteCommand execute commands on remote servers - very nice.

Data

• HTML::Differences provides “reasonably sane” HTML diffs
• Compare database structures using DBIx::Diff::Schema
• Data::Fake is a data generator module with a functional interface
• Read and update complex data structures easily using Data::Focus
• Phash::FFI is an interface for an external library that hashes media files to test for similarity

Development and Interop

• FFI::Me is provides some sugar over FFI::Raw that lets you call foreign language (e.g. C, Python, Ruby) library functions
• Generate a simple-but-sensible module readme with Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Readme::Brief
• Object::Properties is another class library, similar to Object::Tiny with some additional features
• ARGV::Struct parses complex command line arguments

Testing & Debugging

• Carp::Capture stores stack traces for later inspection.
• Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Test::TidyAll will test your distribution code is tidy before letting you publish it

Web

• A couple of new Catalyst modules; Catalyst::Plugin::Session::Store::Cookie does what it says, and Catalyst::Plugin::ResponseFrom which allows the request and capture of responses from external URLs.
• FCGI::Buffer provides a validator and cache for FCGI output

This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.