The Perl Foundation

Web Page: http://epo.means.no/gsoc2011/ideas

Mailing List: mailto:tpf-gsoc-students@googlegroups.com

The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code.

The Perl Foundation coordinates the efforts of numerous grass-roots Perl-based groups, including:

• International Yet Another Perl Conferences
• Carries the legal responsibility for Perl 5 and Perl 6
• perl.org
• Perl Mongers
• PerlMonks

The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Perl Foundation is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization based in Holland, Michigan.

Projects

• CPAN search for the modern web The goal of this project is to build a sophisticated search engine for the CPAN that knows how to return relevant results, by incorporating metadata from sources such as user ratings, user-added tags, dependency graphs, freshness, and test results. This service will provide both a front-end website, and an open REST web API which will allow others to mashup the data and innovate.
• Making the Perl Core UTF-8 clean. Clean handling of Unicode throughout the Perl core, rather than in a certain selected areas.
• Pod parser for Rakudo Write a Perl 6 Pod parser for Rakudo, being capable of generating the documentation from the Perl 6 code as well as accesing the documentation from the Perl 6 code itself.
• Removing the upgrading necessity of the Dancer script with a module. Rewriting the scaffolding script of Dancer as an object-oriented module, allowing testing and extendability, as well as user plugins. Changing the requirement of upgrade (which has become difficult for new and experienced users) and factoring in the logics in the module so the script could be as slim as possible with no need for any upgrades (similar to Catalyst and other projects).
• Rework Catalyst component setup code This project aims to remove the current component loading mechanism in Catalyst, which is very poor and simple, and replace it using Bread::Board, an IoC (Inversion of Control) framework providing a more customizable setup of the components. This will allow more control of how each component is instantiated and loaded, while also simplifying Catalyst code.
• Standardization of core documentation parsing tools I am going to deprecate Pod::Parser by replacing all uses of it within perl's core with Pod::Simple.