At the Bank we have a home-grown ETL framework that we've been using for quite
some time. We recently completed a total rewrite, but unfortunately we left out
a few changes. Had I gotten those changes in 5 months ago, I would have only
had to break the API of about 10 modules. Today, in order to make those
changes, I have to break the API of 122 modules.
What follows is an account of this ordeal, provided for entertainment value
only. There will be a future post that explains some of the things I did to
make this task surmountable.
Continue reading Thoughts while changing the API of a massive framework......
At this month's Chicago.PM
meeting,
I gave a presentation on Dependency Injection and my new module,
Beam::Wire.
[EDIT: The presentation doesn't appear to work on mobile devices. I'm trying
deck.js, and I'm not sure I like it.]
Continue reading Chicago.PM - Dependency Injection (also: Beam::Wire)...
February's meeting was about the Mojolicious Web
Framework. Joel
Berger has written a minimal Perl
CMS called Galileo, and agreed to give a
talk about the benefits of Mojolicious.
Best of all, the talk itself was written in
Mojolicious! As Joel was
talking, he was able to edit the code and display the results, showing off
various features of Mojolicious like:
- Websockets
- Easy testing (even of websockets)
- Helper scripts
- Mojo templates
There are quite a few interesting parts of Mojolicious that make it worth
giving a look to, and I hope to be able to do so with some web projects that
have been sitting in my queue for a while (I wrote a nice ticket tracker with
AngularJS, but the backend is Python, I'd like to fix that glaring mistake).
My job at Bank of America consists largely of data collection and storage. To
collect data in Perl, I have to write XS modules to interface with the
vendor-supplied native libraries. Because I want to know my code works, my XS
modules come with robust test suites, testing that everything works correctly.
Since the XS module was intended to be used by other, larger systems, I decided
to help those larger systems test their dependency on my module: I included a
Test::MockObject that mocked
my module's interface. By using my test module, the tests can try some data and
see if their code works.
But the hardest part to test is always the failures. How do they test if the
news service goes down in the middle of a data pull? How about if it goes down
between data pulls but still inside the same process? How do they test if the
user has input an invalid ID for data?
Continue reading Testing is a Feature of Your Service...
This month's presentation was on the
Git::Repository Perl module,
given by me. In both my jobs, I use the Git::Repository module to automate
releases.
Continue reading Chicago.PM - Scripting Git With Perl...
