NOTE: **perl.org Request Tracker was down for about a week As this happened in the last days of the call for grants period we are extending it till the end of the week The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in February/March 2010. In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI, Strawberry Perl and Perl on a Stick, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl

Eric Wilhelm has finished his grant "improving learn.perl.org":http://news.perlfoundation.org/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=18&tag=learn.perl.org&limit=20". He has written six tutorials from "Getting Started with Perl" to "Your First GUI Desktop Application". The six tutorials are "Getting Started with Perl":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/getting_started/ "Control, Structures, Scoping, and Subroutines":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/csss/ "Using and Creating Modules":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/modules/ "An Introduction to Objects":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/objects/ "Perl/CPAN Configuration Howto":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/configuration/ "Your First GUI Desktop Application":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/wxperl/ The tutorials are currently hosted "http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com, but if Eric finds a better permanent home for them, he

Follows the update from Vadim on his grant: I've implemented 'call' method for interpreter object, which takes already parsed parameters and passes them to tcl/tk interpreter. It is similar to 'eval' method, but it should be faster, and also safer to use, because there will be no need to protect/escape special characters before calls. Also, widget calls to tcl/tk library are based on this method. Also, 'tk' widgets could be

Eric Roode sent the following update: bq. The status is basically that the writing is taking much, much longer than I had expected. I had thought I'd be able to document a couple classes per hour; instead, it's taking me a few hours per class. I don't really know what to do to speed up the process, so I am just continuing to plug along. At the rate I'm going,

Given my high amount of work at the moment and the big number of grants not finished I decided to skip the fourth call for grants for 2009. I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Over the last two weeks, Eric has done a lot of things... bq. I've added the "CPAN and Perl Configuration Howto" to the site. Feedback so far has been good. I'm waiting to hear if there are stumbling points or if it leaves any important questions unanswered. bq. "http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/configuration/":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/configuration/ bq. The "Control, Structures, Scoping and Subroutines" tutorial is now complete. bq. "http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/csss/":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/csss/ bq. I've finished writing the tutorials and am

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce, on behalf of Ricardo Signes, that the TPF-funded work on Pod::Elemental and Pod::Weaver is complete! Here's his final report: Just a few days after predicting that the months-old grant was half done, it became quite clear that the first half was much, much more difficult than the second. The initial grant proposal listed the following targets: clearly defined and

Eric sent me this update: bq. I've sent a handful of changes to Robert and have been asked not to change the page style as apparently there's some other initiative going on. bq. The perl-org-patches list has generated some conflicting changes for the new /tutorials/ page as well as the index.html and I'm trying to resolve that content. The "learnperl.scratchcomputing.com":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com front page has a sketch of where I'm wanting the

After a strong start, work on Pod::Elemental and Pod::Weaver was quickly derailed by conference season, and then by a few non-technical distractions. I've gotten back to work, though, and quite a lot of progress has been made. The second major goal, "extensive tests for Pod::Elemental," is basically complete. Pod::Elemental is fairly well defined, documented, and tested, and can now be used to perform significant document mangling. The "PodPurler" for Dist::Zilla

Kieren Diment reports that the Perl Survey is ready for deployment. He's been hardening the application against abuse by bots, simplifying the original set of demographic questions, and writing new survey questions. Kieren hopes to be freer from distraction as work continues through the end of the year.

Eric sent this update: bq. I've written Combust::Spontaneously to make it possible for anyone to get a local apache-less server running perl.org's templating system in under 5 minutes. It is now on the CPAN. bq. With that, I've been doing some work on the stylesheet and navigation on the combust templates from learn.perl.org and starting to port some of my content into it. bq. --Eric More info about this

Jonathan Worthington writes: Introduction bq. If it weren't for the fact that you said you were going to do it, I would've doubted it could be done at all in current Parrot. pmichaud In many senses, this "Hague Grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/04/hague_perl_6_grant_request_tra.html was rather more challenging than my "last one":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/11/hague_grant_request_rakudo_dis.html. In the course of it, I've been dealing with major changes to some of the things most fundamental to any Perl

Dear all, sorry for the delay. August was a complicated month. It is the Conference month and the Vacation month. But I think it was worth waiting for. This quarter TPF will fund three grants: "Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_corporat.html by Curtis Jewell. This grant will be co-funded by TPF and Adam Kennedy. "wxPerl documentation":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/wxperl_documentation.html by Eric J. Roode. "Changing the Perl 5 optree build process into a

This is the last post presenting a report for all grants at once. Future reports will be posted by respective grant managers whenever they have relevant news. TPF expects grantees to report at least once each month. If you are a grantee, please, easy the task of your grant manager sharing news with him. If you are a grant manager and your grantee does not report for a long time,

After three extenuating days at YAPC::EU::2009, and after some rest time, finally had the time to prepare the list of grant proposals for the third quarter of 2009. We have seven proposals, that can be read in this blog: perl core memory improvements by Jim Cromie wxPerl Documentation by Eric J. Roode Improve the visual design of Perl websites by Jon Allen Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows by

Name: Jim Cromie Email: Amount Requested: How much is your project worth? $3000K Synopsis Memory allocation enhancements in core Perl is greedy wrt recycling sv-bodies; freed bodies are returned to an interpreter-global freelist, where they hang until process termination. Workloads which rotate through large populations of each body-type would be badly limited; there would be no memory left. While this workload profile is arbitrary, so is the limitation. More to

Name: Eric J. Roode, ROODE on CPAN. Email: or Amount Requested: $2500 for Q3 2009. Synopsis Write a lot of much-needed documentation for wxPerl. Benefits to the Perl Community Perl has a reputation as a language that is not suited for GUI development. This is silly; Perl is as suited for GUI as any other language. But the learning curve for most of Perl's GUI toolkits is steep,

Name: Jon Allen Email: Amount Requested: USD 3,000 Synopsis Produce a modern, visually appealing set of templates, stylesheets, and other assets that Perl website owners can easily use and adapt to achieve a stylish look and feel, regardless of the back-end technologies powering each individual site. Benefits to the Perl Community Presentation and visual design forms a strong and lasting impression on website visitors. Unfortunately, the 1990s style of many

Name: Curtis Jewell Email: Amount Requested: US $5000. Synopsis Enhance Strawberry Perl so that it can be customized for different environments, and silently embedded inside of other corporate and open source projects. Benefits to the Perl Community With the upgrade to a .msi installer for Strawberry Perl, it is now possible to solve many outstanding issues and expand Windows Perl in new directions. These include greater compatibility with corporate environments,

Name: Gerard Goossen Email: Amount Requested 5,000 Synopsis This project is to change the Perl 5 optree build process into a step where the parser generates an Abstract Syntax Tree and a step where the executable code in the form of a list of function pointers is generated from the AST. Because this project is refactoring of a major part of the Perl 5 core, a good benchmark of