Perl Foundations Event Mailing List

Go, subscribe and be happy with Perl events.

Good to see the Perl Foundation getting more active.

- http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/12/events_mailing_list.html

Mouse and Moose in Perl - Walking in a winter wonderland... kinda

I like Moose but I work heavily in non-persistent applications. Sadly this makes Moose's start up expense too much.

But recently I revisited Mouse (thanks to a friend). The last time I looked at it, I misread the documentation and it sounds like it was no longer being supported by the original developer. But not anymore, w00t!

The one part I really like about Mouse (and Moose) is the declarative nature of creating accessors (and therefore attributes). I really like this because it reduces the number of simple accessor tests that you need to write (saving time, tendium and kittens).

I used to use Class::Accessor but I always ran into inheritance and validation issues (which I used Params::Validate but this caused lots of custom magic for inheritance).

I think the Mouse/Moose syntax is significantly cleaner.

Compare Class::Accessor:

package User;

use strict;
use warnings;

use Carp;

use base qw( Class::Accessor );

__PACKAGE__->mk_accessors( qw( id username password first_name last_name ) );

# override new since I really don't like the hash ref creator and I want validation
sub new {
   my $class = shift;
   my $self  = $class->SUPER::new;

   return $self->_init( @_ );
}

# does init and validation
sub _init {
   my $self = shift;
   my %p    = validate @_, { # wrap in sub to override in inheritance so ugly 
                  id => 1, username => 1, first_name => 1, last_name => 1};
   # init them here
}

1;

vs Mouse:

package User;

use Mouse; # includes strict and warnings

use Carp;
use English qw( -no_match_vars );

has 'id'       => ( is => 'ro' );
has 'username' => ( is => 'rw' );
has 'password' => ( is => 'rw' ); 
has 'first_name'   => ( is => 'rw', isa => 'Str' );
has 'last_name'    => ( is => 'rw', isa => 'Str');

no Mouse;

1;

Plus the super great lazy_build option which is perfect for database handles and such.