The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce the election of Alberto Simões to the position of Grants Committee Chair. Alberto was elected by the Grants Committee members from a pool of four strong candidates. Alberto is president of the Portuguese Association for Perl Programmers the leader of Braga.pm and the co-chair of YAPC::EU 2005 in Braga, Portugal. Alberto is a Ph.D. student in Machine Translation at the University of Minho

In July and August, we had our monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.14 and 0.4.15. There were various language updates, but one of these deserves special mention. The 0.4.15 release included an implementation of "Not Quite Perl". This language implements a subset of the full Perl 6 feature set, and will be used within the compiler tools for all languages running on Parrot, and as a way to bootstrap a complete

Following on from the success of his recent XML::RSS grant Shlomi Fish has been awarded another grant to create a reusable parser for the syntax of MediaWiki the popular open-source wiki engine that powers sites such as Wikipedia and Wikiquote. The deliverables of the grant are a CPAN module and a Kwiki plugin for using this MediaWiki syntax in Kwiki wikis, enabling people to create Perl projects that can parse

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org by the end of August. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of October. First, please read about how to submit a grant Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don't meet the criteria. For example, if

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Chris Dolan's Policies for Perl::Critic grant awarded April 07, is now underway. Chris intends to add twenty policies that are inspired by Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices to Perl::Critic to help developers to make their code more maintainable. Chris has written the first of the twenty policies funded by the grant, Perl::Critic::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitComplexMapping, which insists that the block argument to map has at

May and June saw the usual monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.12 and 0.4.13. Between these two releases, there were numerous language updates, including PHP and Lisp. On the Perl 6 front, 0.4.13 was the first release where Parrot passed the Perl 6 sanity tests. This is an exciting achievement, because it means that Parrot supports enough of Perl 6 that the developers can start using Perl 6 to bootstrap its

Three more Perl 6 Microgrants have been awarded! Jesse Vincent of Best Practical writes: Flavio Glock will receive a travel microgrant to help him attend YAPC::EU and evangelize kp6 and the Perl 6 in Perl 6 effort. Steve Pritchard will receive a microgrant to complete the RPM packaging of Parrot and Pugs for Fedora, and to submit those packages for inclusion in the official Fedora distribution. Steve will be blogging

Since this update is so late, I'm taking the liberty of covering three months of Parrot work, rather than two. That means this report covers February through end of April of 2007. Parrot has been sticking to its new monthly release schedule, which means that we saw three releases in this grant period, 0.4.9, 0.4.10, and 0.4.11. The highlight of this period is the finalization of the object design marking

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org Because we're running a little late this time, submission deadline is June 8, 2007, voting starts immediately after. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of July. Voting usually goes fairly quickly, so we don't anticipate a problem. First, please

I am pleased to announce that Shlomi Fish has completed his XML::RSS cleanup grant In his own words, Shlomi has summarised the work he's done and offers his thanks to those who helped him transform XML::RSS into a high quality tool for the community: This is a summary of a Perl Foundation XML::RSS grant, I've been doing. Its scope was for two or three months from 1 January, 2007 onwards,

From Jesse Vincent and Leon Brocard: We're pleased to announce that we've selected Phil Crow as the recipient of the second Perl 6 microgrant. Phil is the hacker behind the Java::Swing module that allows Perl programmers to put a Java Swing GUI on their application without writing any Java and he'll be using this knowledge to convert Java declarations to Perl 6. You can find details of the project he's

The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce two new grant awards. The first is adding new policies to Perl::Critic. The second is improving the Smolder project. Note that the second project involves the TAP::Parser module This was a project I started, currently maintained on the CPAN by Andy Armstrong This is slated to be the replacement for Test::Harness. Because we're seeing more grant applications involving this module, I have decided

Here are the latest update from the Mango grant. As a side note, we're working on a new process for getting grant information out even faster than we currently do If everyone signs off, this information should be much more timely. Update 1 I finally got desperate enough to find a solution I could live with after rolling my own config file format. So, I managed to convert the admin/roles/users

From Jesse Vincent Leon Brocard: We're pleased to announce that we've selected Steve Peters as the recipient of the first Perl 6 microgrant. Steve has been instrumental in helping to ensure that Perl 5 has stayed incredibly portable for the past few years. Steve's starting to turn some of his attention to Parrot. You can find details of the project he's planning in the text of his grant application:

First off, let's get the bad news out of the way. Here's Adam's final report on the PPI refactoring editor: It is with some sadness I think I will have to finally draw a line under this effort and consider it over. Without the appearance of a pure-Perl cross-platform programmer's text editor on the CPAN, I don't see how I can complete the proof of concept. The entire grant was

Here's the latest grant update as sent to NLNet The 0.4.8 release Parrot marked the completion of a design milestone, the IO PDD. This is a major accomplishment, as the design work on IO impacts much of Parrot's design, including areas such as concurrency and networking. This work was completed by Allison with help and review by Jerry Gay. The next area Allison will be focusing on is the object

Desperately trying to catch up with everything needed for the grant committee and am getting around to posting grant updates for Ingy and Chris Laco. For Ingy's "Port PyYAML to Perl" grant: Ingy's not been able to make much progress over the last month due to other commitments, but is now back in the saddle. He's aiming to do the the libyaml bindings first. This will likely get us to

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org Submission deadline is the last day of February, voting starts in March and we will be awarding the grants by the beginning of April. First, please read about how to submit a grant Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if

We have two grant updates this time. Adam Kennedy's "Extending PPI Towards a Refactoring Perl Editor" has no new news to report. This grant is currently stalled. Shlomi Fish's work on "XML::RSS Cleanup", however, is going quite well. Read on for more information. Well, I wrote two use.perl.org journal entries about XML-RSS that detail some of my progress: http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/32081 http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/32121 What's been accomplished: 1. Moving the data files from under

Chris Laco's Mango grant application work was delayed slightly, but he's now starting on it. Below is his latest grant update, as collected by his grant manager, Adrian Howard. Well, it's that time of year. Time to pay the piper. Handel 1.0 and Handel-Storage-RDBO 0.01 are in a holding pattern waiting for releases of DBIC and RDBO, but they're done. Time to get the Mango train rolling. Done: setup