Moose

Not blogging too much lately, I am a bit overclocked with all the work and university classes. Though in the positive side I enjoy my work and it feels like I am doing my hobbies full-time, which is actually pretty cool.

My open source work these days concentrates around the Perl interface for FluidDB, Net::FluidDB, the Rails documentation project docrails, and writing the Active Support Core Extensions Rails Guide, which I'd like to finish for Rails 3. I am doing Net::FluidDB from Fluidinfo by the way.

With Net::FluidDB I've discovered Moose. That's the de facto standard nowadays for writing object-oriented Perl and it is fucking awesome. Very concise, good abstractions, and powerful.

Moose supports a lot of stuff, for instance attributes are declared. You can declare also their visibility, predicates, whether they are required, or lazy... There's multi-inheritance and roles (think Ruby mixins). Method delegation, method modifiers (before callbacks and such as in CLOS or Rails). Meta-classes and other stuff for meta-programming... It's an amazing module, doing OO with it is a joy. And it is very well designed in my view, usage feels just right.

Even if you are not into Perl I think the Moose Manual is worth having a look at.