Padre on Strawberry Perl v5 released

I am quite excited to let you know about the new release of the Padre on Strawberry Perl Windows installer. I planned to make a release once a month but I could not wait for the full cycle to end, I wanted to get this out. There is a screencast showing some of the new features of this distribution.

Thanks to the heroic work of Ahmad Zawawi the upcoming Padre 0.86 release will finally allow you to use a modern version of the Scintilla editor. This means you will be able to type defined-or and the syntax highlighter won't spit on you like a badly maintained camel. People installing the new Padre on Strawberry package will get Padre 0.842 which is 0.84 and this specific feature back-ported.

Welcome to the age of perl 5.10!

The distribution also includes Moose and [dist://Task::Kensho]. This is not new, but seems to be surprising to some people.

There is an upgraded version of Dancer and the package now includes the Template::Toolkit that will allow the building of complex applications.

CPAN Testing

The package include [dist://CPAN::Reporter] and [dist://Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase] to make it easier for people to start sending in test reports to the CPAN Testers. I think I'll have a separate blog entry about this.

Some CPAN modules

The previous package already contained a number of Spreadsheet related modules. Now it also includes [dist://Text::CSV_XS] to deal with CSV files.

[dist://Net::Telnet] is also included to make it easier to connect to unix machines, routers and other networking devices.

[dist://Win32::GuiTest] is a nice tool to automate mouse movements and pressing on keyboard on Windows. This can be used to automate various GUI related tasks and to test desktop applications.

[dist://App::cpanoutdated] was added to make it easier to know what needs to be updated in the next version.

SDL and Games!

Probably the most exciting part is the inclusion of SDL and two games based on it. One of them is the original Frozen Bubble game. Yes, it has a Wikipedia entry!

The other one is the zombies game called [dist://Games::Zumbis]. It is not enough that you are a little red-haired girl fighting zombies, the game is also written in Portuguese!

Enjoy!