In this presentation we will dive into the Punk ecosystem: an open source MVC web framework with first class openAPI integration, template engine, job queue, json codec, non blocking data layer and http client all built on a highly optimised event-loop web server.
Robert Acock (LNATION) is a CPAN author with over 250 contributions. They run their own contracting company, LNATION LTD, which also recently launched OpenAPI Proxy. They like to experiment with C/XS, writing Perl as fast as it can be.
]]>In this practical workshop we'll take a real Dancer2 application and add an MCP server that exposes its existing functionality to AI clients. Along the way we'll look at the MCP protocol, JSON-RPC, tool discovery, schema design and request handling, while keeping the implementation cleanly separated from the application's existing business logic.
We'll see how a YAML-driven design allows a single source of truth for tool definitions and documentation, and why adding MCP often turns out to be far less work than you'd expect when your application's architecture is already sound.
By the end of the session you'll understand the MCP protocol, know how to implement an MCP server in Perl, and have a design you can adapt to your own applications.
Speaker:
Dave Cross has been writing Perl professionally for more than thirty years. He is the author of several Perl books, including Data Munging with Perl (Manning) and Perl Template Toolkit (O'Reilly), and has been speaking at Perl conferences around the world since the late 1990s.
He builds web applications with Dancer2, contributes to open source, and has recently been exploring how established Perl applications can integrate with modern AI technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). His Line of Succession website now exposes its data through an MCP server, allowing AI assistants to query Britain's royal succession directly from the site's underlying database.
Dave believes the best way to learn a new technology is to build something real with it, and this workshop is based on exactly that experience.
]]>This is a practical exploration of PAGI::FastAPI and its latest addition PAGI::FastAPI::Security that introduces you to modern asynchronous Perl web development if you have been using FastAPI in Python asking yourself why this can't be done in Perl. (Spoiler: it can now)
Mohammad Sajid Anwar is a CPAN author and White Camel award recipient, recognised for his sustained contributions to the Perl community. He is the author of "Design Patterns in Modern Perl" and the creator of "The Weekly Challenge", a long-running initiative since 2019. He is an editor of the Perl Weekly newsletter. He speaks regularly at Perl conferences and is an active mentor and contributor across the CPAN ecosystem.
]]>This was an ad-hoc presentation and thus we did not have an abstract for it.
]]>00:00 Introduction
01:30 OSDC Perl, mention last week
03:00 Nikolai Shaplov NATARAJ, one of our guests author of Lingua-StarDict-Writer on GitLab.
04:30 Nikolai explaining his goals about security memory leak in Net::SSLeay
05:58 What we did earlier. (Low hanging fruits.)
07:00 Let's take a look at the repository of Net::SSLeay
08:00 Try understand what happens in the repository?
09:15 A bit of explanation about adopting a module. (co-maintainer, unauthorized uploads)
11:00 PAUSE
15:30 Check the "river" status of the distribution. (reverse dependency)
17:20 You can CC-me in your correspondence.
18:45 Ask people to review your pull-requests.
21:30 Mention the issue with DBIx::Class and how to take over a module.
23:50 A bit about the OSDC Perl page.
24:55 CPAN Dashboard and how to add yourself to it.
27:40 Show the issues I opened asking author if they are interested in setting up GitHub Actions.
29:25 Start working on Dancer-Template-Mason
30:00 clone it
31:15 perl-tester Docker image.
33:30 Installing the dependencies in the Docker container
34:40 Create the GitHub Workflow file. Add to git. Push it out to GitHub.
40:55 First failure in the CI which is unclear.
42:30 Verifying the problem locally.
43:10 Open an issue.
58:25 Can you talk about dzil and Dist::Zilla?
1:02:25 We get back to working in the CI.
1:03:25 Add --notest to make installations run faster.
1:05:30 Add the git configuration to the CI workflow.
1:06:32 Is it safe to use --notest when installing dependencies?
1:11:05 git rebase squashing the commits into one commit
1:13:35 git push --force
1:14:10 Send the pull-request.
perl Makefile.PL, install dependency, run make and make distdir.META.json file.Makefile.PLorigin) and forking later and calling that fork.Makefile.PL and add the META_MERGE section and verify the generated META.json file.fork as a remote repository and push the branch to it..gitignore and maybe setting up GitHub Action.main branch, create the .gitignore file.Organizations make it easier to have multiple maintainers and thus ensuring continuity of project, but it might also mean that none of the members really feel the urge to continue working on something.
In any case, I tried to collect all the Perl-related GitHub organizations.
Hopefully in ABC order...
Beyond grep - It is mostly for ack, a better grep developed by Andy Lester. No public members. 4 repositories.
Catalyst - Catalyst is a web-framework. Its runtime and various extensions are maintained in this organization. 10 members and 39 repositories.
cpan-authors - A place for CPAN authors to collaborate more easily. 4 members and 9 repositories.
davorg cpan - Organisation for maintaining Dave Cross's CPAN modules. No public members and 47 repositories.
ExifTool - No public members. 3 repositories.
Foswiki - The Foswiki and related projects. 13 members and 649 repositories.
gitpan - An archive of CPAN modules - 2 members and 5k+ read-only repositories.
Kelp framework - a web development framework. 1 member and 12 repositories.
MetaCPAN - The source of the MetaCPAN site - 9 member and 56 rpositories.
Mojolicious - Some Perl and many JavaScript projects. 5 members and 29 repositories.
Moose - Moose,MooseX-*, Moo, etc. 11 members and 69 repositories.
Netdisco - Netdisco and SNMP-Info projects. 10 members and 14 repositories.
PadreIDE - Padre, the Perl IDE. 13 members and 102 repositories.
Paracamelus - No public members. 2 repositories.
Perl - Perl 5 itself, Docker images, etc. 20 members, 8 repositories.
Perl Actions - GitHub Actions to be used in workflows. 5 members and 9 repositories.
Perl Advent Calendar - including the source of perl.com. 3 members and 8 repositories.
Perl Bitcoin - Perl Bitcoin Toolchain Collective. 3 members and 7 repositories.
Perl Toolchain Gang - ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Build, etc. 27 members and 41 repositories.
Perl Tools Team - source of planetperl , perl-ads etc. No public members. 6 repositories.
Perl Dancer - Dancer, Dancer2, many plugins. 30 members and 79 repositories.
perltidy - Only for Perl::Tidy. No public members. 1 repository.
perl5-dbi - DBI, several DBD::* modules, and some related modules. 7 members and 15 repositories.
perl.org - also cpan.org and perldoc.perl.org. 3 members and 7 repositories.
Perl5 - DBIx-Class and DBIx-Class-Historic. No public members. 2 repositories.
perl5-utils - List::MoreUtils, File::ShareDir etc. 2 members and 22 repositories.
Perl-Critic - PPI, Perl::Critic and related. 7 members and 5 repositories.
perl-ide - Perl Development Environments. 26 members and 13 repositories.
perl-pod - Pod::Simple, Test::Pod. 1 member and 4 repositories.
PkgConfig - 1 member 1 repository.
plack - psgi-specs, Plack and a few middlewares. 5 members and 7 repositories.
RexOps - Rex, Rexify and related projects. 1 member and 46 repositories.
Sqitch - Sqitch for Sensible database change management and related projects. No public members. 16 repositories.
StrawberryPerl - The Perl distribution for MS Windows. 4 members and 10 repositories.
Test-More - Test::Builder, Test::Simple, Test2 etc. - 4 members, 27 repositories.
The Enlightened Perl Organisation - Task::Kensho and Task::Kensho::*. 1 member and 1 repository.
Thunderhorse Framework - a modern web development framework. No public members. 4 repositories.
Webmin - Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like servers. - 5 repositories.
These are bot Perl-specific GitHub organizations, but some of the repositories are in Perl.
cPanel - Open Source Software provided by cPanel. 1 member and 22 repositories.
DuckDuckGo - The search engine. 19 members and 122 repositories.
Fastmail - Open-source software developed at Fastmail. 4 members and 38 repositories.
RotherOSS - Otobo (OTRS fork). No public members. 47 repositories.
You can lock_hash and later you can unlock_hash if you'd like to make some changes to it.
In this example you can see 3 different actions commented out. Each one would raise an exception if someone tries to call them on a locked hash. After we unlock the hash we can execute those actions again.
I tried this both in perl 5.40 and 5.42.
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use Hash::Util qw(lock_hash unlock_hash);
use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);
my %person = (
fname => "Foo",
lname => "Bar",
);
lock_hash(%person);
print Dumper \%person;
print "$person{fname} $person{lname}\n";
say "fname exists ", exists $person{fname};
say "language exists ", exists $person{language};
# $person{fname} = "Peti"; # Modification of a read-only value attempted
# delete $person{lname}; # Attempt to delete readonly key 'lname' from a restricted hash
# $person{language} = "Perl"; # Attempt to access disallowed key 'language' in a restricted hash
unlock_hash(%person);
$person{fname} = "Peti"; # Modification of a read-only value attempted
delete $person{lname}; # Attempt to delete readonly key 'lname' from a restricted hash
$person{language} = "Perl"; # Attempt to access disallowed key 'language' in a restricted hash
print Dumper \%person;
$VAR1 = {
'lname' => 'Bar',
'fname' => 'Foo'
};
Foo Bar
fname exists 1
language exists
$VAR1 = {
'language' => 'Perl',
'fname' => 'Peti'
};
00:00 Working with Peter Nilsson
00:01 Find a module to add GitHub Action to. go to CPAN::Digger recent
00:10 Found Tree-STR
01:20 Bug in CPAN Digger that shows a GitHub link even if it is broken.
01:30 Search for the module name on GitHub.
02:25 Verify that the name of the module author is the owner of the GitHub repository.
03:25 Edit the Makefile.PL.
04:05 Edit the file, fork the repository.
05:40 Send the Pull-Request.
06:30 Back to CPAN Digger recent to find a module without GitHub Actions.
07:20 Add file / Fork repository gives us "unexpected error".
07:45 Direct fork works.
08:00 Create the .github/workflows/ci.yml file.
09:00 Example CI yaml file copy it and edit it.
14:25 Look at a GitLab CI file for a few seconds.
14:58 Commit - change the branch and add a description!
17:31 Check if the GitHub Action works properly.
18:17 There is a warning while the tests are running.
21:20 Opening an issue.
21:48 Opening the PR (on the wrong repository).
22:30 Linking to output of a CI?
23:40 Looking at the file to see the source of the warning.
25:25 Assigning an issue? In an open source project?
27:15 Edit the already created issue.
28:30 USe the Preview!
29:20 Sending the Pull-Request to the project owner.
31:25 Switching to Jonathan
33:10 CPAN Digger recent
34:00 Net-SSH-Perl of BDFOY - Testing a networking module is hard and Jonathan is using Windows.
35:13 Frequency of update of CPAN Digger.
36:00 Looking at our notes to find the GitHub account of the module author LNATION.
38:10 Look at the modules of LNATION on MetaCPAN
38:47 Found JSON::Lines
39:42 Install the dependencies, run the tests, generate test coverage.
40:32 Cygwin?
42:45 Add Github Action copying it from the previous PR.
43:54 META.yml should not be committed as it is a generated file.
48:25 I am looking for sponsors!
48:50 Create a branch that reflects what we do.
51:38 commit the changes
53:10 Fork the project on GitHub and setup git remote locally.
55:05 git push -u fork add-ci
57:44 Sending the Pull-Request.
59:10 The 7 dwarfs and Snowwhite. My hope is to have a 100 people sending these PRs.
1:01:30 Feedback.
1:02:10 Did you think this was useful?
1:02:55 Would you be willing to tell people you know that you did this and you will do it again?
1:03:17 You can put this on your resume. It means you know how to do it.
1:04:16 ... and Zoom suddenly closed the recording...
.gitignore file.fold function that is not tested and not even used.fold, but I'll probbaly don't do it on RT.long-header branch.header_as_string in the documentation.