Houston.pm

Wade presented more high-level testing tools and strategies for testing, rather than the normal introduction to Perl unit testing which we have done in the past.

Mark indulged his curiosity about which Platform as a Service providers do a good job of supporting Perl.

Reini describes a script he uses to test a large number of Perl versions as part of the development of the Perl compiler.

brian was back in Houston and volunteered to give an early look at the "Advanced Modulinos" talk he plans for the summer conference season. The modulino technique arose as a way to make scripts more testable. In this presentation, brian explains how to convert a script into a modulino as well as best practices for refactoring to make it more testable and flexible. Since the presentation was not complete at the time of the presentation, brian then lead a discussion about other techniques and ideas that the group could identify for better modulinos. brian also talked quite a bit about his history and how he came to be the developer and author he is today.

Mark Allen introduced the Dist::Zilla distribution building module from the point of view of someone who is new to the module.

Nicolas presented an overview of object oriented programming in Perl. After covering the basics, he surveyed the different Perl modules that provide support for OO in Perl.

Perl programs are normally compiled from script into memory and executed without a separate compilation step. The standard distribution once had a program that could compile as Perl script into a standalone executable. In this talk, Reini Urban describes the Perl compiler and some of the issues with updating this program to modern Perl versions.

Next, Jake described some work he has done recently for converting ranges of IP addresses in various forms into a set of IP addresses. This talk was more low-level than most presentations.

Finally, we had a series of lightning talks that covered several different topics.

Mark Allen will be presenting the "Intro to Dancer" talk he gave at OSCON 2011. If he has time, Mark has also offered to give a quick overview of some of the Perl information he learned at OSCON.

Gordon Child presented the Cobbler installation system. It supports rapid deployment and configuration of servers via a network boot.

In this talk, Wade introduces the basics of automated testing assuming little knowledge of the Perl testing culture. The purpose of the presentation is not to make you an expert tester, but to introduce the concepts, tools, and reasoning behind automated testing in Perl.

Gordon described the problem with testing Web Applications. He demonstrated using Selenium to test applications by automating different browsers to actually execute the web application.

Nick Koston explored using Devel::NYTProf, Benchmark, and Data::Dumper to optimize Perl code. He explored some of the reasons that Perl code can be slow, and how to fix it.