On behalf of AthenaLab, Im extremely happy to announce the
winners of AthenaLabs $1,000 prize for a Perl 6 based wiki.
The winners are Carl Mäsak, Johan Viklund, and Ilya Belikin.
They are members of the November project, which is a wiki
written in Rakudo Perl 6.
Carl Mäsak and Johan Viklund started the November project,
and Ilya Belikin has been very helpful in working on later
developments. I greatly appreciate what theyve
accomplished.
(Of course November crucially depends on a working version
of Perl 6. So I also greatly appreciate the supporting
achievements of the {Rakudo Perl 6, Parrot VM, and Pugs Perl
6 prototype} teams. Despite the relatively few people
involved, and their very limited financial support, their
tireless efforts have nevertheless given us the
rapidly-maturing Perl 6 system. This system is now
relentlessly evolving into an {exceptionally-adaptable,
super-industrial-strength, super-pragmatic} platform. Its
still got a ways to go, but the growing development momentum
is extremely encouraging.)
So thanks much to everyone involved for all of their great
work! Please consider supporting them by whatever means you
have available.
A public prototype of November is now operational. While
November is still in the early stages of development,
considerable progress has been made. The November developers
have also been very helpful in supporting Rakudo Perl 6
development. As Carl Mäsak puts it: "I'm crashing Rakudo
today, so that it won't crash for you tomorrow. Thats how I
like to think of it. Theres no way around it: someone has
to go first and clear the way with a machete. Software grows
robust by being tested and fixed a lot."
That was one of my main objectives in selecting a prize
topic back in May, 2006. November has already exceeded my
hopes along these lines, so I decided to make the award back
in January of this year. We delayed the public announcement
to allow time for completing the latest release of November,
and for making the corresponding public server upgrade.
More information about {the November wiki project, Rakudo
Perl 6, and related topics} can be found at the end of this
note.
Carl has kindly provided the following overview of
achievements, near term plans, and long term vision.
== What has been done so far
Since it was unveiled to the world during YAPC::EU in
August, the Perl 6 wiki engine called "November" has seen
over 750 commits from mainly three core developers. During
that time, the wiki has matured from a simple script to a
family of modules, some of which have trickled into other
Perl 6 projects. As soon as Rakudo could precompile modules,
we added a build step, which led to a much-needed 17-fold
speedup in page loads.
Novembers port of CPANs HTML::Template was completely
rewritten using Perl 6 grammars. A tags/tagcloud feature was
added. A subset of the MediaWiki markup has been
implemented. The beginnings of a set of Perl 6 web modules
were seen with the arrival of modules for application-level
URI dispatching. November was given a brand new default
stylesheet, and rewritten to be compatible with mod_perl6,
also currently in development. Using an improved version of
Rakudos Test.pm, we added tests for all of our existing
modules.
Today, the Perl 6 version of November can do user
authentication, editing, basic wiki formatting, recent
changes, and pluggable layouts and formatting engines.
== Plans for the next few months
November is usable today, but lacks many basic features
usually associated with a wiki engine. Specifically, we hope
see images, per-page revisions, line-by-line diffs, conflict
merging, widget plugins, formatting plugins, and RSS/Atom
feeds added within the next half-year or so.
During the past few weeks, a small ecosystem of Perl 6
projects has started to take shape, mainly on github. To
prevent code duplication across projects, some modules will
likely leave the November nest and make homes of their own.
A simple installer (called "proto") has been created to
install and manage dependencies smoothly -- installing and
setting up Parrot, Rakudo, and November with all its
dependencies can thus be done with a single command, making
November (and other Perl 6 projects) more accessible for
newcomers.
There are also plans to develop a one-stop Web module in
Perl 6, making it easier to create and deploy all types of
web applications, from almost-static pages to full-featured
MVC-based web sites. When this module is mature enough,
November will be refitted to run on top of it.
== Long-term vision
A fair amount of commits remain until November can be called
"full-featured", but when that happens, it is our hope that
people will pick it up, deploy it, enjoy it, and extend it.
November still has many, many commits to go before it can
actually trump other good wiki implementations out there in
terms of desirable features. However, it is our hope that it
will continue to serve the Perl 6 community in terms of
catching bugs, exploring new language patterns, and
providing inspiration for novice Perl 6 hackers. One day, it
might well sport a set of features that other wiki
implementations can only dream of having. The Perl 6
language makes such a vision seem quite probable.
== End of overview
Further information
The original version of this announcement:
http://www.AthenaLab.com/Perl_6_Wiki_Award.htm
The November page:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?november
Carl Mäsaks blog:
http://use.perl.org/~masak/journal/
The newly-designated primary site for Rakudo Perl 6
information (in early set up stage):
http://rakudo.org/
The official Perl 6 wiki:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?perl_6
The Long Perl 6 Super-Feature List:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?the_long_perl_6_super_feature_list
Rakudo Perl 6 Feature Status:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?rakudo_feature_status
The origins of this $1,000 prize:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?conrad_schneiker#about_that_1_000_prize
PS: Thanks to {Andy Lester of http://perlbuzz.com/ and
associates} for setting up the official {Perl 5 and Perl 6}
wikis in 2006, and to {Paul Fenwick and associates} at
http://perl.net.au/wiki/Perl_6 for earlier versions.
Best regards,
Conrad Schneiker
www.AthenaLab.com
Official Perl 6 Wiki http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6
