Picking up momentum
Posted by rmp at 22:20 4th Jul 2007
It seems people are fairly taken with the BarCamb idea. It's been lightly advertised internally at Sanger and has been picking up some interest via that and also on the upcoming page http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/208327/ .
I wonder how many of the people already signed up actually have something to present. Having been at the WTSI for nearly eight years now I've a number of things I could talk about, it's just a case of deciding which of them would be more interesting for people and that really depends on where attendees are coming from.
So... one or more of the following, of the things I've been working on recently - Bio::Das::Lite & Bio::Das::ProServer, ClearPress or the new sequencing technology. Now I'm not a biologist or a chemist either by trade or by hobby and I'm pretty certain that talking about NST is going to be asking for a whole bunch of biology and chemistry-question trouble. I guess DAS-related things are the most useful to present as they have the widest scientific application.
Though there's nothing like a good bit of self-promotion so maybe something short on ClearPress would be a good thing too. Might need to improve the application builder and test-suite a bit more for that.
In related news, not wanting to be outdone by Matt's BarCamb I coauthored and submitted a venue proposal for YAPC::Europe 2008 last week. Woohoo! Nail-biting stuff. The genome campus would be a great place to host it for all sorts of reasons - integrated and well supported conference centre; secured financial committment; great science to talk about and a tremendous perl resource to tap into just to list a few.
All I need to do now is submit my travel application for YAPC::Europe Vienna later this year and see how it's done (again). It's been a while since I've been to a YAPC::Europe!
(0 comments)
Psyphi Blog v5
ClearPress-99
Posted by rmp at 22:10 3rd Mar 2008
Last week saw the latest release of ClearPress, http://search.cpan.org/~rpettett/ClearPress/ . ClearPress is a basic, RESTful, MVC Perl application framework I've developed in tandem with my work at the Sanger Institute http://www.sanger.ac.uk/ .
The original aim of ClearPress was to provide a RESTful MVC framework which integrated with the Sanger's website single sign on. Having proved its usefulness with the first release of the tracking system I developed, ClearPress was spun off into a project of its own together with dependencies abstracted out of the Sanger-specific environment.
ClearPress sports a MySQL-backed ORM, automatic, extensible content-negotiation and easily-templated HTML, XML, Atom, RSS, JSON, iCal, YAML, PNG and other format views. It can run standalone, as CGI or under ModPerl::Registry.
I'm using ClearPress in most of my projects these days, both work and non-work. Blogs, document management, laboratory tracking and various other standalone apps. Hopefully soon there'll even be a dedicated site together with examples. For now you can check out the application-builder and example distributed with the package. (0 comments)
The original aim of ClearPress was to provide a RESTful MVC framework which integrated with the Sanger's website single sign on. Having proved its usefulness with the first release of the tracking system I developed, ClearPress was spun off into a project of its own together with dependencies abstracted out of the Sanger-specific environment.
ClearPress sports a MySQL-backed ORM, automatic, extensible content-negotiation and easily-templated HTML, XML, Atom, RSS, JSON, iCal, YAML, PNG and other format views. It can run standalone, as CGI or under ModPerl::Registry.
I'm using ClearPress in most of my projects these days, both work and non-work. Blogs, document management, laboratory tracking and various other standalone apps. Hopefully soon there'll even be a dedicated site together with examples. For now you can check out the application-builder and example distributed with the package. (0 comments)
Web frameworking
Posted by rmp at 23:47 31st Mar 2008
It seems to be the wrong time to be reading such things, but over on InfoQ there's a nice_article introducing web development of RESTful_services using Erlang and the Yaws high performance web server.
I say "the wrong time" as this week has kicked off the "Advancing with Rails" course by David_A._Black of Ruby_Power_and_Light fame. The course is fairly advanced in terms of required rails knowledge so it's a bit of a baptism by fire for me and a few others having never written any Ruby before.
Rails is proving moderately easy to pick up but as I've remarked to a couple of people, it doesn't seem any easier coding with Rails than with Perl. Perhaps it's because I've never done it before but I reckon it's a lot harder spending my time figuring out what the heck DHH meant something to do than it is doing it myself.
Even though it's nowhere near as mature, I do reckon my ClearPress framework has a lot going for it - it's pretty feature-complete in terms of ORM, views and templating ( TT2 ). It has similar convention over configuration features meaning it's not designed for plugging in other alternative layers but it is absolutely possible to do (and I suspect without as much effort as is required in Rails). I still need to iron out some wrinkles in the autogenerated code from the application builder and provide some default authorisation and authentication mechanisms, some of which may come in the next release. But in the meantime it's easy to add these features, which is exactly what we've done for the new sequencing run tracking app, NPG to tie it to the WTSI website single sign on (MySQL and LDAP under the hood).
(0 comments)
I say "the wrong time" as this week has kicked off the "Advancing with Rails" course by David_A._Black of Ruby_Power_and_Light fame. The course is fairly advanced in terms of required rails knowledge so it's a bit of a baptism by fire for me and a few others having never written any Ruby before.
Rails is proving moderately easy to pick up but as I've remarked to a couple of people, it doesn't seem any easier coding with Rails than with Perl. Perhaps it's because I've never done it before but I reckon it's a lot harder spending my time figuring out what the heck DHH meant something to do than it is doing it myself.
Even though it's nowhere near as mature, I do reckon my ClearPress framework has a lot going for it - it's pretty feature-complete in terms of ORM, views and templating ( TT2 ). It has similar convention over configuration features meaning it's not designed for plugging in other alternative layers but it is absolutely possible to do (and I suspect without as much effort as is required in Rails). I still need to iron out some wrinkles in the autogenerated code from the application builder and provide some default authorisation and authentication mechanisms, some of which may come in the next release. But in the meantime it's easy to add these features, which is exactly what we've done for the new sequencing run tracking app, NPG to tie it to the WTSI website single sign on (MySQL and LDAP under the hood).
(0 comments)
ClearPress-146
Posted by rmp at 23:15 29th Apr 2008
Latest release of ClearPress (v146) out to the CPAN yesterday. The ClearPress data model now implements belongs_to_through, belongs_to, has_many and has_many_through entity relationships for all you ActiveRecord lovers.
Two ClearPress-derived projects are using a half-decent test fixture system. It's really making a big difference to the development of both DECIPHER and NPG so I'm planning to bundle what can be bundled with an upcoming release. (0 comments)
Two ClearPress-derived projects are using a half-decent test fixture system. It's really making a big difference to the development of both DECIPHER and NPG so I'm planning to bundle what can be bundled with an upcoming release. (0 comments)
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