view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

Model-View-Controller framework idea, of which more later.

Another project I briefly played with was a personal robot, using the
C<Sphinx>/C<Festival> speech handling and recognition modules from
Cepstral and Kevin Lenzo. I didn't have X10, so I couldn't shout
"lights" into the air in a wonderfully scifi way, but I could shout
"mail" and have a summary of my inbox read to me, "news" to get the
latest BBC news headlines, and "time" to hear the time. Of course,
getting computers to tell the time nicely takes a little bit of work. I
don't like "It's eleven oh-three pee em", since that's not what someone
would say if you asked them the time. I wanted my robot to say "It's
just after eleven", and that's what L<Time::Human> does. Shame about the
localisation.

=head2 Messing About With Classes

One of the things that continues to amaze me about Perl is its
flexibility; the way you can change core parts of its operation, even
from pure Perl. This lead to quite a few modules, many of which were
mere proofs of concept.

OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

reasonably be expected to work out. C<Tie::DiscoveryHash> was all about
having the computer find out stuff for itself.

This has influenced a number of my modules, which have focussed on
trying to make everything as simple as possible for the user (or more
usually, for the programmer using my modules) and then a bit simpler.

So, for instance, I found the whole process of keeping values persistent
between runs of Perl a bit of a nightmare - I could never remember the
syntax for tying to C<DB_File>, and I would always forget to use the
extremely handy C<MLDBM> module. I just wanted to say "keep this
variable around". L<Attribute::Persistent> does just that, cleanly and
simply. It even works out a sensible place to put the database, so you
don't have to.

Similarly, L<Config::Auto> works out where your application might keep a
configuration file, works out what format it's in, parses it, and hands
you back a hash. No muss, no fuss. And more importantly, no need to even
think about writing a config file parser again. It's done once, forever.
L<Getopt::Auto> applies the same design principles to handling command
line arguments - I hate forgetting how to use C<Getopt::Long>.