Recently in Perl 5 Development Category

Liquid Web are the latest company to donate the significant sum of $10,000 (USD) to the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund, Liquid Web wish to "assist in the continued development and maintenance of the dynamic and powerful Perl programming language".

Liquid Web, Inc. are a rapidly growing managed Web Hosting company, with locations in Michigan and Arizona with a clear commitment to innovation and development. Liquid Web has developed much of its software using Perl and will continue to do so in the future so consider it essential to help support the Perl community. The programming language serves as an integral tool for the continued development of the company's existing systems such as its billing, support and monitoring programs.

Liquid Web Founder and CEO, Matthew Hill, speaks on the importance of the Perl Community, "Giving back to the Perl community is something we've been interested in for some time. As Liquid Web continues to expand and grow, we find the need for more developers proficient in Perl grows in kind. Supporting Perl's continued excellence ensures that important programs that have proven invaluable to Liquid Web's success will continue to perform to our specific needs."

Karen Pauley, President of the Perl foundation, was delighted with the news of the donation. "This investment in Perl's future from Liquid Web will go a long way to help maintain the viability of Perl 5 as a platform for the many businesses that depend upon it and will deliver a positive impact upon the entire Perl community".

Liquid Web Inc. is a privately held managed web hosting company founded in 1997, with three wholly owned data center facilities located in Lansing, Michigan. In 2010 Liquid Web opened a software development office in Scottsdale, Arizona. Liquid Web is a leader in the professional web hosting market with an unwavering dedication to providing the best hosting products available.  Liquid Web has over 20,000 clients served in over 120 countries.  To service our customers we have assembled a world class Heroic Support staff and a proactive Sonar Server Monitoring team, professionally educated and easily accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Liquid Web received the INC.5000 Fastest Growing Companies award in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. 

As announced by Karen Pauley at this year's YAPC::EU in Riga, Latvia, NET-A-PORTER.COM, the world's premier online luxury fashion retailer, will donate $10,000 to the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. NET-A-PORTER is committed to innovations in web technology and has created a bespoke e-Commerce platform to offer its customers a fast, responsive and interactive user experience. It uses Perl for a number of its programs and makes this donation as a sign of its commitment to the language and an acknowledgement of the work that the Foundation is doing.

Richard Lloyd-Williams, Head of Group IT at NET-A-PORTER, explains, "It is fantastic to be giving something back to the Perl community. Without the work of the Perl Foundation we would not be able to customise and build on the NET-A-PORTER platform as effectively as we have done. This donation is one way we've chosen to show our gratitude."

"The generous support from Net-A-Porter will allow us to extend and expand grants to Perl developers who are working on the essential maintenance of the Perl 5 Core," said TPF president Karen Pauley, while attending YAPC Europe. "This will directly benefit the many thousands of Perl users around the world, helping us improve the language experience for everyone."

NET-A-PORTER.COM was launched in June 2000 and has since successfully established itself as the world's premier luxury online fashion retailer.  Presented in the style of a fashion magazine, NET-A-PORTER features collections from over 350 of the world's most coveted designers including Chloé, Marc Jacobs, Burberry, Miu Miu, Stella McCartney and many more.  With its acclaimed editorial format, express worldwide shipping to 170 countries (including same day delivery to London and Manhattan), luxurious packaging and easy returns, NET-A-PORTER offers an unparalleled shopping experience.

It is my pleasure to announce that the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund (Perl 5 CMF) has attracted sponsorship from cPanel. cPanel approached Karen Pauley, president of The Perl Foundation, during the recent YAPC::NA conference in Asheville and announced their intent to sponsor this fund. Karen was both pleased and delighted at the generosity of cPanel who have decided to sponsor $10,000.

cPanel has been developed in Perl and they have been sponsoring Perl events for many years, cPanel have been major contributors towards North American YAPCs as well as workshops. This generous contribution towards the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund is just another example of their continued investment in the Perl community and the Perl language.

On hearing the news of this generous contribution Nicholas Clark, who will be one of the recipients of the initial funding drive, stated, "donations are wonderful news, and a clear vote of confidence in the ongoing relevance of Perl 5 in the commercial environment. It's great to see this encouragement for the less than sexy work that provides the firm foundations to the more visible and fun aspects of Perl's renaissance."

cPanel is a leading Web Hosting Control Panel Software provider supplying hosting automation tools to numerous data centers and customers all around the world. cPanel offers web hosting software that automates the intricate workings of web hosting servers. cPanel products are used on tens of thousands of servers worldwide to equip server administrators with the tools they need to provide top notch hosting to their customers. Since our beginnings, in 1997, cPanel has been developed in Perl and has made an ongoing commitment of the Perl community.

It is my pleasure to announce that Booking.com approached Karen Pauley, president of The Perl Foundation, during the recent YAPC::NA conference in Asheville and announced their intent to sponsor the Core Maintenance Fund. Karen was both pleased and delighted at the generosity of Booking.com who have decided to sponsor $10,000.

Booking.com have sponsored Perl events and initiatives for many years and have also been host to Perl events at their offices in Amsterdam. They employ a large and committed team of Perl developers and use Perl for a vast number of tasks in their business. Booking.com have spoken favourably about how Perl has given them the "flexibility and efficiency that has enabled them to grow quickly".

"The Perl Foundation is delighted to announce this generous gift to the Perl 5 Maintenance Fund from Booking.com, a consistent supporter of Perl." said Karen Pauley, president of TPF, "This donation comes at a key time [for the fund] and will be exceptionally helpful to ensure the ongoing maintenance of Perl 5. This is yet another example of the commitment Booking.com has to Perl and a demonstration of their generosity to the Perl Community".

Booking.com is one of the world's leading online hotel room reservation services and part of the priceline.com group. Booking.com was founded in 1996 and is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Booking.com attracts millions of unique visitors each month who can choose from over one hundred and thirty-five thousand participating hotels based in over one hundred countries worldwide. Booking.com reserves greater than two hundred thousand room nights each day in over forty languages. They have over forty offices worldwide serving twenty-four hours a day to their customers.

A new version of Perl, 5.14, was officially released on 14th May following the successful test period, including the testing of release candidates. This is the first release of Perl 5 using the new annual schedule.

There are a number of enhancements and alterations in this version, a full list of changes can be found at (http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perldelta.pod), a summary of some of the changes:

• Unicode 6.0 support, along with many, many improvements to our Unicode-related features
• Improved support for IPv6
• Significantly easier autoconfiguration of the CPAN client
• A new /r flag which makes s/// substitutions non-destructive
• New regular expression flags to control whether matched strings should be treated as ASCII or Unicode
• New "package Foo { }" syntax
• Uses less memory and CPU than previous releases
• A swathe of bug fixes, a large number associated with the work of Dave Mitchell (http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/05/fixing-perl5-core-bugs-report-11.html) who has been fixing some deep bugs thanks to a TPF grant;

It is important to note that this version marks the official end of support for Perl 5.10.

This work is just one year of development since the release of Perl 5.12.0. It contains nearly 550,000 lines of changes from close to 3,000 files, this work was done by 150 authors and committers. The documentation, as always, pays tribute to those people who worked hard on this new version, "Many of the changes included in this version originated in the CPAN modules included in Perl's core. We're grateful to the entire CPAN community for helping Perl to flourish." The success of this version is dependent on the great work of the whole community, a particular note of thanks should go to Jesse Vincent for his coordination skills as release manager for 5.14.

Below is an overview of the programs that were financially supported by The Perl Foundation in 2010. Programs are roughly broken up into 3 categories: Events, Marketing, and Development.

Perl events

The Perl Foundation supported four conferences in 2010. Those conferences were: The North American Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC::NA), Frozen Perl, The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, and The Perl Oasis. Each event is expected to be self-sustaining through program fees and donations. However, TPF did provide support to each event in the form of free services. Event organizers were able to pick and choose which services they needed:

• Use of the donate.perlfoundation.org payment gateway for the various events to receive registration fees and sponsorship contributions. Each event received 100% of the amount contributed, any transaction fees were covered by TPF. In the course of a year this works out to over $2,500 in event sponsorship.
• Event liability insurance, which is often required by event venues. The liability policy costs TPF over $1,000 to maintain per year.
• Use of TPF as an established legal entity when required to enter into contracts with event venues and contractors. This freed event organizers from needing to spend time and expenses related to establishing their own organizations for each event.
• Handling all disbursements to venues, caterers, contractors, speakers, etc.. All postage, wire transaction fees, and accounting expenses were covered by TPF, which cost over $500 in 2010.

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided a $500 sponsorship of the Enlightened Perl Organization's "Send-a-newbie" program for YAPC::EU. TPF also provided a $500 sponsorship for YAPC::NA's "VIP party", an event targeted at first-time YAPC attendees.

Perl marketing

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided $1,000 in free printed marketing materials distributed by volunteers staffing Perl advocacy booths at various non-Perl events through the year.

TPF also paid $1,600 to have professional content continuously written for the perl.com web site through the year.

In 2010, TPF spent $1,800 for trademark applications in Canada, Europe, and Japan. The Perl Foundation now holds trademarks on Perl in both the United States and Canada.

Perl development

The Perl Foundation maintained their associate membership with The Unicode Consortium in 2010 at an expense of $1,500. This membership enhances Perl developers' abilities to maintain support of Unicode within Perl. It also gives Perl a voice in contributing to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard.

Through a development grant made possible by Ian Hague in 2008, TPF paid over $14,000 in grants for the further development of Perl 6 in 2010. At the end of this year, there is $27,000 remaining unallocated in the Perl 6 development portion of the Hague grant. Grants completed this year included:

• Jonathan Worthington's "Rakudo Signature Improvements"
• Solomon Foster's "Numeric and Real Support"
• Travel support for Patrick Michaud to speak about Rakudo and recruit volunteers at conferences.

TPF was awarded a $50,000 grant from Booking.com for "further development and
maintenance of the Perl programming language". TPF has used $25,800 of those funds in the form of monthly payments to David Mitchell for his grant "Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs." This grant will be continued into 2011.

The grants committee paid over $6,000 in grants from community contributions. The following grants were completed in 2010:

• Ricardo Signes' "Archive::Zip bugs" and "Improve Dist::Zilla's Tests, Documentation, and Structure"
• Vadim Konovalov's "Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux" and "Tcl/Tk Access in Rakudo"
• Curtis Jewell's "Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows"
• Gerard Goossen's "Changing the Perl 5 optree build process into a Abstract Syntax Tree generation and a code generation step"
• Leon Timmermans' "Embeding Perl into C++ Applications"
• Sebastian Riedel's "The Mojo Documentation Project"
• Kieren Diment's "The Perl Survey"
• José Castro and Bruno Martins' "Perlbal documentation"

In 2010, The Perl Foundation in cooperation with The Parrot Foundation sponsored 10 projects in The Google Summer of Code. TPF provided over $1,600 in support for this program, which will eventually be recovered back from Google.

Looking ahead to 2011

In 2011, we expect our areas of support to remain roughly the same. We remain committed to supporting Perl events, marketing, and development.

How you can help

Improved fundraising is a requirement to maintain the strong support of Perl provided by The Perl Foundation in 2011. If you find value in the work that is being support by TPF, please consider making a donation. To contribute, please visit https://donate.perlfoundation.org

Jesse Vincent writes:

It gives me great pleasure to announce Perl 5.12.2, the third stable release of Perl 5.12.

Shortly, you will be able to download Perl 5.12.2 from your favorite CPAN mirror or from: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.2/

SHA1 digests for this release are:

75dbbdfa5bf8d4fc813503253e2b58486fa5a4eb perl-5.12.2.tar.bz2
c157f214a93ce20fc06dc9d9c902c05ad1327cb1 perl-5.12.2.tar.gz

This release contains minor bug fixes and updates of several core modules, as well as minor documentation updates. It should be fully backward compatible with Perl 5.12.0 and 5.12.1.

Perl 5.12.2 is a recommended upgrade for all users of Perl 5.12.

You can find a full list of changes in the file "perl5122delta.pod" located in the "pod" directory inside the release and on the web at:

http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.2/pod/perl5122delta.pod

Perl 5.12.2 represents approximately three months of development since Perl 5.12.1 and contains approximately 2,000 lines of changes across 100 files from 36 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its third decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.12.2:

Abigail, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Ben Morrow, brian d foy, Brian Phillips, Chas. Owens, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams, Chris Williams, Craig A. Berry, Curtis Jewell, Dan Dascalescu, David Golden, David Mitchell, Father Chrysostomos, Florian Ragwitz, George Greer, H.Merijn Brand, Jan Dubois, Jesse Vincent, Jim Cromie, Karl Williamson, Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯, Leon Brocard, Maik Hentsche, Matt S Trout, Nicholas Clark, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, Rainer Tammer, Ricardo Signes, Salvador Ortiz Garcia, Sisyphus, Slaven Rezic, Steffen Mueller, Tony Cook, Vincent Pit and Yves Orton.

We expect to release Perl 5.12.3 in mid-December 2010, followed by Perl 5.12.4 in mid-March. The next major release of Perl 5, 5.14.0 should appear in spring 2011.