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,