Cat-a-Moose

June 26, 2008

It looks like the Catalyst developers are seriously looking into rewriting their core code to use Moose. There is a very interesting interview of the two main people involved. Some of the answers really spell out clearly the benefits of using Moose compared to other Perl object frameworks. Catalyst is a very widely used web framework so in my opinion the big things which this project could really deliver is a much faster Moose with much wider usage.


Moose versus Plain Perl

June 11, 2008

Some people have questioned the wisdom of basing future software projects on an Object-Oriented programming technology such as Moose (see previous posts for more details on Moose if you don’t know what it is) rather than doing it the good old-fashioned way in pure, unadulterated Perl.

There are always questions to be considered whenever a new piece of software is introduced into the mix. Is it widely used? It is well written? Does it produce comprehensible and maintainable code? Could someone who has not seen it before pick up where someone else left off in the standard “run over by a bus” scenario? Is it likely to scare the living daylights out of anyone who’s never seen it before? I believe that most of these have been answered on the web by the wider Perl community when it comes to Moose. It seems clear, to me, that something like this is the future of all Perl OO programming, particularly given that it is inspired by work being done for Perl6.

In an attempt to show that Moose produces code which is comprehensible, maintainable and in many ways a big improvement over the pure Perl approach. Here’s an example written both ways: Foo.pm and FooMoose.pm. One thing to notice straight away is that the Moose variant is 49 lines long compared to the 114 lines of the standard version. It allows all the standard handling of getting and setting values to be hidden away. The author can then get on with specifying exactly how the class attributes should be defined.

There’s no doubt that the Moose approach is different, it doesn’t look quite like normal Perl but it is a very perl-ish way of programming. Beyond needing to learn a few basic keywords I don’t think there is much in the code which will scare a Perl programmer who has not previously touched Moose. I’d hope that, if anything, Moose should make it easier for future developers to maintain and extend code written in this way.