Moose

I have been dabbling a lot with Moose, a solid framework for object oriented programming in Perl. It is remarkably powerful and has transformed the way I look at Perl OO. It is also different enough from object oriented programming in other languages that I needed to create a section for it on coolnamehere.

Boilerplate

Perl OO has a reputation for boilerplate: large chunks of code that have little relation to the task at hand, but are necessary for the application to work at all. Fortunately, Moose cuts down significantly on the boilerplate. You can cut it down even more by taking advantage of the features available in recent versions of Perl, and that is exactly what I do in my code templates.

# MyClass.pm
use 5.14.0;

package MyClass 1.0 {
    use Moose;

    # Attributes and methods go here.

    no Moose;
    __PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;
}
    
=head1 NAME

MyClass

=cut

Since I am not being paid by the word, I ignored most of the Perldoc boilerplate that I use.

That’s it, really. You can move on if you’re not interested in my rambling explanations.

The Rambling Explanation

Let’s examine the boilerplate code.

use 5.14.0;

This tells perl that the program requires features that only become available in Perl 5.14. If I tried to load this library in an application using a different version of Perl, it simply would not work:

Perl v5.14.0 required--this is only v5.12.3, stopped at MyClass.pm line 1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at MyClass.pm line 1.

I also get Perl 5.12 and Perl 5.10 features, as long as they haven’t been made redundant by a change in the newest Perl.

package MyClass 1.0 {

This is one of those syntactical enhancements that I like in Perl 5.14. Here’s my package. It’s called “MyClass”. It has a $VERSION of 1.0. I suppose I could use MooseX::Declare, but I’m still getting the hang of core Moose functionality.

use Moose;

Now I’ve told Perl that the MyClass package is actually a Moose class. A lot of stuff is going on the background now, as all the Moose support structure is loaded and set up.

# Attributes and methods go here.

Okay, yeah. That part’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

no Moose;

Now that I’m done with MyClass, I want to get all the special Moose names out of the way.

__PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;

A fully fleshed Moose object maintains a lot of flexibility. Unless I explicitly need that flexibility, I should make the class a little lighter.

}

That’s it. The package is done. It’s worth noticing what’s missing: the classic 1; that has ended Perl modules for years. As far as I can tell, the new package syntax makes it unnecessary. Perl 5.14 doesn’t complain about it missing.

Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01