A Random Walk

Today I wandered around Perl6 stuff just a little bit. Here's some things that I ran into:

use.perl

First stop, masak's journal entry at use.perl. He's building a persistence layer for Web.pm that mimic's Ruby's ActiveRecord in a very simple way. Quite cool.

Drawing Blanks

Recently Rakudo Perl was changed so that make install could work. Actually, it was changed so that, in order to run the perl6 binary anywhere other than the build directory, you must run make install. Anyway, someone updated the page describing how to get Rakudo to include the make install instructions. Only they actually typed $make install where all of the other command-line-like lines have a space after the dollar sign and before the command. For some reason that little inconsistency was bugging me, so I thought, "I've got a login and edit rights, I'll just go change it!" The only problem is that when I tried to login, it took me to a blank page. Then, I was poking around on rakudo.org and there were several prominent pages that all ended up blank on my browser. Bummer. I left a note to alester with a bot on IRC in hopes that he'd know what to do.

Turtles all the way down

On a lark, I tried to install Rakudo on cygwin. However, the only Windows box I have handy is actually a VirtualBox instance. So, I tried installing Rakudo on a unix environment running on a virtual Windows environment running on a unix OS. In the process I realized just how much of Parrot's build process is dependant on Perl. It got a long way before it complained about not being able to find a compiler.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. After installing parrot, it died tried to execute parrot_install/bin/parrot_config. In fact, it seemed to die executing any of the parrot binaries from within the parrot_install/bin directory. In fact, it seemed that the only time executing one of the parrot binaries worked was when they were run from the parrot build directory.

The End

And here's where it ended because I was too tired to do anything else.

Perl 6 databases

Earlier today (or perhaps yesterday by the time I get around to publishing this) Tim Bunce showed up on #perl6 and asked who wanted a commit bit to his java2perl6 project that converts Java files into Perl6. I wanted one. I've long been interested in something like DBI on Parrot, but DBI on Perl 6 is the next best thing. So, I checked out a copy of java2perl6 and started poking around.

Wait ... what?!? What does Java have to do with DBI or Perl 6? A while back, Tim Bunce posted that the JDBC made a good model for the driver interface for DBI 2, so we might as well just use it. So, that's what's happening. We're starting with the java code for JDBC and writing software to automatically convert these java files to Perl 6. And then eventually, something like DBI wil be built on top of it all. But java2perl6 is the start.

Anyway, the java2perl6 README says

See the POD in java2perl6 (in the bin directory of the distribution) for information on how to use this module.

Great. I know how to do this, I'll just type perldoc bin/java2perl6and see what it takes to get started. Never mind that I only have passing familiarity with Java, I'll figure that out later. I know Perl 6 fairly well.

Oops! Perldoc had some problems:

POD ERRORS
    Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:
    Around line 104:
        ’=end pod EOS’ is invalid.  (Stack: =begin pod)

As it turns out, java2perl6 generates some POD as part of its output.
This POD is in a here-document which apparently confuses perldoc
since the directives that are part of the output are at the start of
lines. Aha! My first contribution to the java2perl6 project: making
java2perl6 accessible via perldoc.

Okay ... now what?

The documentation in java2perl6 gives me a good overview of the command line arguments, what the program is supposed to do, and some nice examples. So, after installing the dependencies, I do the usual perl Makefile.PL && make && make test dance and everything looks okay. All tests successful. Now to attempt a conversion or two.

There's a directory called testjavas which looks to contain some java code I can try this out on, so I do:

 perl -Mblib blib/script/java2perl6 -j '-classpath testjavas' ClassTest

Since I haven't installed java2perl6, I invoke it from within the build directory and pass the testjavas directory as an argument to javap. The name of the file that I'm converting to Perl 6 is ClassTest.java. The result of running the above command is that I now have a ClassTest.pm file with some Perl 6 code in it that hopefully mimics the class definition specified in ClassTest.java.

Looking at ClassTest.pm, it seems that java2perl6 doesn't generate the various data members defined in the .java file. That seems like something I could try to implement. But, as usual, I have far too little time to continue pursuing this and I'm feeling sleepy, so perhaps updating the generator is tomorrow night's task.

On a lark, I reran the above command with the --check option to see what happened and it failed specatularly because it couldn't execute a perl6 binary in my path. That seems like something that's under-documented. Also, it would probably be nice to specify a particular location for the perl6 binary rather than relying on the
path.

There seems to be a goodly amount of low-hanging fruit for participation for when I'm not so sleepy. Awesome. For now, I'm off to bed.