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

Now that I've joined the Board of Directors for the Perl Foundation, my first action was to propose a marketing committee be set up and the board approved the proposal. It's an ambitious goal, but a useful one. In the past, we've merely had a single PR person such as Andy Lester or Joshua McAdams. The problem with this approach is that there is simply too much for them to

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.

This year's Google Summer of Code has ended. We would like to thank "Jonathan Leto":http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/, the mentors, and the students for all their hard work. Jonathan has written an excellent summary of the project, "Perls of Wisdom: The Perl Foundation Parrot's Google Summer of Code":http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/10/perls-of-wisdom-perl-foundation-parrots.html, and the code is also "available":http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2009-tpf/downloads/list. We hope to participate in this project again next year and if you are interested in working with us

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

As part of a renewed effort to expand the membership of the "Board":http://www.perlfoundation.org/who_s_who we are pleased to announce the addition of Curtis "Ovid" Poe as our newest Director. Ovid is not new to The Perl Foundation, having been involved with the grants committee since 2003, and we are delighted that he is willing to take on this role. His first task will be to work with Dan Magnuszewski to expand

Every year during conference season, we assess positions in TPF that we need to fill and take advantage of in-person meetings at conferences to try to find candidates. Now that we've worked through that cycle, I'm happy to announce some volunteers in new positions. Josh McAdams is moving from PR to Conference Chair and anyone who enjoyed the 2 YAPC::NAs in Chicago knows he's a natural for this position. Long-time

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

Below is the latest Hague grant request, submitted by Jonathan Worthington. Please feel free to comment below. h2. Project Title Rakudo Signature Improvements h2. Synopsis This grant aims to increase correctness, completeness, stability and performance of Rakudo's implementation of signatures and signature binding. h2. Benefits to Perl 6 Development Rakudo has continued to make impressive progress in recent months, and recently the Rakudo team, of which I am a part,

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

Name: Shlomi Fish Email: Amount Requested: $1500 Synopsis CPANHQ a community-driven, meta-data-enhanced interface to CPAN. Benefits to the Perl Community The current CPAN interfaces http://search.cpan.org/ kobesearch, and the rest of the CPAN services that various individuals have set up are not integrated, are not based on enough meta-data, are not enough community-driven and are generally lacking. As a result of all this, some people started the "Rethinking CPAN" effort: http://www.google.com/search

Name: Shlomi Fish Email: Amount Requested: $1500. Synopsis Develop a powerful Foreign Function Interface for Perl 5, similar to Python's ctypes. Benefits to the Perl Community ctypes provides a very handy way to call hard-coded subroutines in shared libraries, but only for Python. Having a similar module for Perl will benefit Perl 5 programmers who will be able to call subroutines in C and similar compiled languages from their Perl

Dear all, I am sorry to inform that I am busy with YAPC::EU::2009 organization. This means that this time we will not have grants updates, and that grants evaluation for this quarter will start later two weeks. #grants