I’m just releasing my first new release of DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler in six months! For the most part the release is just a few doc tweaks, but it does have one important new feature, the “_any” version.

If you didn’t already know, DBICDH has a handy little directory structure for how your deploys work. If you haven’t seen it, take a look. This new release allows you to use _any in place of a version or version set, which will run the given files no matter what version you are deploying to.

Enjoy!

This year Rob Kinyon and mst convinced me to do some speaking at YAPC. I ended up doing three forty minute talks. The DBIx::Class one was certainly the easiest, but also the one I was least invested in. I didn’t write DBIx::Class and it’s a big enough project that the slides nearly wrote themselves.

I also did a talk on DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler. I am a little frustrated with how this talk went down. I am confident that DBICDH is an excellent piece of software that can do some really cool things and I kinda botched the end of the talk (very abrupt.) I wouldn’t call the talk a failure; it had a great turnout and at the very least I got to discuss features with jnapiorkowski, which was fun.

My third talk was about DBIx::Exceptions. It was hard for a couple reasons; first off DBIE isn’t actually done yet. That certainly is not conducive to talking about something. Second, what it ultimately does really isn’t that complicated. The module is almost entirely a function of doing some research. So while I think that the subject is good and interesting, I don’t think it warrants a whole 40 minute talk. I actually had a long discussion with Rob about exceptions in general and he strongly supported the point of view that exceptions in any language are fundamentally flawed. I’ll turn that into a blog post at some point.

I finished all three of the talks in less than forty minutes; I think that was a combination of me talking too fast (DBIC + DBICDH) and not actually having enough content (DBIE.) I would have done better were I less nervous, which should be less and less of a problem as a I practice technical speaking more. I actually did a lot of presentations in college and rarely had these issues, but in college I almost never spoke about software I wrote and my talks were usually from 10 to 20 minutes long. Another thing that I feel is important is that I need to try to add humor to my talks. The talks that are the most engaging are also the ones that are entertaining. I’m not sure I how I could work in jokes etc, but I need to try to do that next time.

In other news, I’m pretty worn out in general from YAPC. I just need a break. So while I will do bug fixes and whatnot for my existing modules, and I still hope to release DBIx::Exceptions very soon, I’m going to try to chill out for about a month before taking on any of the other large ideas I have in mind for the future. Or at least I won’t start them on purpose

Do you remember when you first realized that you were not the only person with a perspective in the world? I do. I was 5ish and I remember looking into the car to the left of me and seeing another person looking at me from their respective car. I remember thinking, “This is not what it is like from their point of view.” I distinctly remember reevaluating things all day that day. I am sure that I was still just as selfish and childish as I was before that moment, but it certainly changed my point of view.

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I am proud to announce, after three months of work, that DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler is at a point where I’d call it stable and usable. DBICDH is a much more flexible replacement for DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned. Castaway did a great job with making Schema::Versioned, and without it there is no way I would have gotten started on DBICDH, but it is my sincere hope that this will be the recommended tool instead of Schema::Versioned from now on. Rob Kinyon and mst had significant influence on the overall API and design, so it is at least influenced by Very Smart people. ribasushi helped a lot later on by pointing out poorly named methods and directories as well as helping me use SQL::Translator correctly since he knows all of its weaknesses and strengths.

Major features this has over DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned:

• Multiple files for migrations
• Perl files in migrations
• Shared Perl/SQL for different databases
• Downgrades
• Not to mention extreme customizability

So try it out today! I am looking forward to getting bug reports soon

Oh also, if it does not quite do what you want…

PATCHES WELCOME!