kentcowgill.org/blog

Hello, I forgot to post a note about this.

My third contribution to CPAN is an important one. It is Acme::LOLCAT.

Or, to translate this announcement into LOLCAT using this module:

OH HAI, I FRGOT TO POST NOTE ABOUT THIZ.

MUH THIRD CONTRIBUSHUN TO CPAN AR TEH AN IMPORTANT ONE. IT AR TEH ACME::LOLCAT. KTHX.

OR, TO TRANSLATE THIZ ANNOUNCEMENT INTO LOLCAT USIN THIZ MODULE:

So, I released another module to CPAN today.

It's called Perl::Critic::Nits, which at this point only has one policy module, one that discourages accessing what appears to be private member data of a class. Feel free to have a look. Though if you're reading this post significantly after the date I'm posting it, that version may no longer be the most recent release.

It pretty much looks for anything that accesses a hashref subscript or an arrayref subscript. And in case you can't guess - that can be a problem if you're not dealing with an object. Like if, for instance, you have a regular old hash reference.

Drat.

Elliot Shank reminded me that the code being examined isn't compiled, so it's a little tough to figure out whether or not something isa blessed object, or just a plain hashref. D'oh.

At least it's easy enough to disable a policy. :/

However, it will definitely catch attempts to access an object's member data directly, so I don't feel so bad about that. So long as the pseudo convention of assigning $_[0] to a variable called at least either $self, $package, or $class.

Please enjoy, and let me know if you run into any bugs.

Ok, to be fair - it's really not a problem I have with CPAN.

A month or so ago, I won a copy of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook as a 'door prize' at a Chicago Perl Mongers meeting. I devoured it within a few days, reading it during my daily commute.

Of special interest was the section on creating a test harness (or custom status report) for testing output by making use of Test::Harness::Straps . This was very cool because I had tried to get Test::TAP::HTMLMatrix to install on my Mac earlier this year only to be met with failing tests, or failing tests of dependencies. I don't recall, but I was really bummed. Figuring out the issue was beyond me at the time - I looked into it, but didn't have a ton of time, and I couldn't quickly see the issue.

Anyhow, today I had a bit a inspiration to make use of the example code from the book and see if I couldn't use it to produce some fancy HTML output of my own to give an at-a-glance status of tests I had run, similar in nature to the cool Pugs Smoke Reports . So, I whipped open my copy of Perl Testing , typed in the example code, ran it against some tests I had recently written at work, fixed the bits that were broken (by consulting the documentation for Test::Harness::Results )... run, view, tweak, repeat ad nauseum.

I finally got something fairly close to approximating those cool Pugs reports. But there were some big differences - which I couldn't figure out how to implement quickly (after all - the rest of the development of this parser was really quick and easy) - and I was running short on supplemental time. I actually thought it might be beneficial to take another look at HTMLMatrix and see if I could tweak that a bit.

I took a look in my .cpan cache directory, but it wasn't still there. So I fire up my CPAN shell and try to install it (knowing full well it will fail, but my fingers are trained to type install MODULE).

And before I know it, it's successfully installed.

So I've decided to spread my testing goodness throughout the world.

It started with a vim plugin to quickly go through some perl source and create stub test files for a given source code file.

Then I got the bright idea to create a perl module to do the same thing. Partially helped by a suggestion from Jon Rockway after a quick lightning talk about my plugin.

Available for your enjoyment is the original vim plugin as well as the perl module it evolved into, the current version of which is located in my CPAN directory

Hopefully these are of some use or helpfulness to someone. Possibly even you. :)