November was very much a development period for CPAN Testers. There has been a lot of work going on in the backend, with Ask working on the new backend database and HTTP submission process, and myself working on several sites, including 2 new ones. There has also been some work by David Golden and Chris Williams on the smoker tools, so although we may have been publicly quiet, there has been a lot of effort being put in to push CPAN Testers forward.
One of the new sites, The CPAN Testers Preferences site is now ready to go. We finally got the SSL Certifcate approved, signed and installed, so look for a bigger announcement next week about that. The site will allow authors to set preference filters for the reporting they currently receive via the Author Notification Service. Currently only Daily Summary Reports are available, but this will be extended to the individual reports as well as Weekly Summary Reports, as soon as I have some time to add those reports in.
The more interesting site to be worked on is the main CPAN Testers Reports site. Following on from my use.perl post regarding Sorting CPAN, the backend code now uses the new database to correctly sort distribution versions. However, the biggest change to be made will be to make the site very dependant on Javascript. There is already Javascript on the site at the moment, but it wasn't written well enough to cope with some of the HUGE pages, and as such some author and distribution pages suffer from popups asking the user whether they wish to continue a long running script. This has now been resolved, and the new pages load a lot faster. In addition the filter mechanism has now been extended to include the ability to filter on the perl version and/or OS name. There is still a bit of work still be done, but again expect an announcement regarding the site in the next couple of weeks.
One thing to note about the Reports site, is that I am not currently coding it as I would a static site. If you don't have javascript enabled, then you will not be able to see the data. Once the dynamic site is available then a flat HTML version will be possible, together with the provision for AJAX requests to view specific results on your site.
At the London Perl Workshop, both Chris Williams and myself gave CPAN Testers related talks. Chris gave a more up to date version of the talk he present at YAPC::Europe in Copenhagen during the summer, while I presented a behind the scenes look at the files used to present CPAN, BACKPAN and parts of the CPAN Testers site, finishing up with the new Uploads Database. The event went very well and by all accounts all the talks were very well received. No doubt a few CPAN Testers talks will feature in some of the workshops and conferences during 2009 too.
One event that will be featuring the CPAN Testers project, will be the 2009 QA Hackathon. This is being held in Birmingham, and although this is a very dedicated event to bring together the developers involved in QA projects, if you have suggestions for attendees, would like to nominate a person we should contact, or even better still have a sponsor contact, then please visit the wiki and add a post to the site.
We topped 133 testers submitting reports last month, our highest ever, so thank you very much to everyone involved. This included 17 new addresses mapped, of which 6 new testers were identified.
Expect more news and announcements in the coming weeks as we move ever closer to CT2.0 :)
