The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in May 2008. In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI and Strawberry Perl, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl internals, Jouke Visser's pVoice, Chris Dolan on Perl::Critic and many others http://www.perlfoundation.org/grants for more references>. You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or

During the period for Call of Grant Proposals were proposed three projects of which none was approved. Q2 period for Call of grant Proposals will open on 1st April with some news regarding voting process. Stay tunned.

During the last month the Grants Committee changed its composition. Two members stepped out as their professional affairs did not leave time to do a good job at this committee. To them, Hugo van der Sanden and Stas Bekman our sincere thanks for all their dedication during the last years. Two new members stepped in. They are Will "Coke" Coleda and Perrin Harkins For them our welcomes, and good work

Yesterday, TPF received word from Google that our submission to be a participating organization in the 2008 Google Summer of Code project was accepted. Our thanks to everyone involved in the application process, but especially to Eric Wilhelm who organized and drove the effort. We will provide more details here soon.

Parrot releases continue to come out once a month. Version 0.5.2 was released in January. The highlight of 0.5.2 for many is surely the inclusion of a perl6 make target, meaning that you can now take a Parrot release and make yourself a Perl 6 binary in just three easy steps: tar -xvzf parrot-x.x.x.tar.gz cd parrot-x.x.x perl ./Configure.pl make perl6 The end result is a perl6 binary that you can

November and December saw the usual monthly release of Parrot. However, November's release was particularly notable, as it was version 0.5.0. The minor version number increase came because it includes an implementation of the object design as specified in PDD15. This was a major piece of work, both in the implementation, and integration with existing language implementaitons. The 0.5.1 release was also quite exciting. The major work for this release

It gives me great pleasure to announce that, last month, Chris Dolan successfully completed his "grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2007/04/new_grant_awards.html to write 20 Perl-Best-Practices-inspired policies for "Perl::Critic.":http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Critic/ There are several reasons why this wasn't posted sooner, but I apologise for the delay. Chris delivered 19 out of the 20 policies originally proposed, as one of the policies was implemented by another contributor prior to the start of the grant. During the course of this

The Parrot team has continued to make monthly releases, releasing 0.4.16 in September and 0.4.17 in October. These releases include more work on the NQP language as well as many updates and cleanups for the design documents As usual, there were also plenty of bug fixes, and in particular much of the code was reviewed as part of the effort to complete the PMC design. I'm very happy to report

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