NAME Acme::Thing - Represent anything as Perl (CPAN) module SPECIFICATION VERSION 0.1 VERSION This document describes version 0.1.0 of Acme::Thing (from Perl distribution Acme-Thing), released on 2023-03-19. DESCRIPTION "Acme::Thing" is a convention for representing anything as a Perl module/distribution. Custom prerequisite phase/relationship in distribution metadata can be used to relate the thing to other things. The "get_thing_attrs" class method can be used to rerieve attributes of the thing. The module's POD can be used to document the thing. Naming convention The module should be named "Acme::Thing::$SUBNAMESPACE::$NAME" where $SUBNAMESPACE is one or more levels of subnamespaces and $NAME is the name/title of the thing. Both $SUBNAMESPACE and $TITLE should use "CamelCase" notation and should be in singular noun form whenever possible. Underscore is used to separate name parts. For example, for a TV series the $NAME could be the title of the series using the IMDB convention: Acme::Thing::TVSeries::BreakingBad_2008_2013 Acme::Thing::TvSeries::CornerGas_2004_2009 and for a book title the $NAME could be the title (without the subtitle) of the book, preferrably with the publication year. Subsequent editions of a book should be named using the "nE" notation. Examples: Acme::Thing::Book::ProgrammingPerl_1991 Acme::Thing::Book::ProgrammingPerl_4E_2012 Relationship with other things TBD. Attributes The module must provide a class method called "get_thing_attrs" (by itself or by inheritance, doesn't matter), which must return a DefHash containng attributes of the thing. The required attributes are: * title Title of the thing, in a format common for that thing. For example, for a book title: { title => "Programming Perl", isbn => ..., year => 1991, summary => ..., description => ..., ... } For a TV series: { title => "Breaking Bad", year_first => 2008, year_last => 2013, imdb_title_id => ..., summary => ..., description => ..., ... } Why? Now comes the harder question: why use Perl module/distribution to represent seomthing at all, other than an actual Perl module? Releasing as Perl distribution and module leverages a few things: 1) the CPAN distribution metadata (see CPAN::Meta) where a distribution can depend (relate) to other modules (other things); 2) the CPAN infrastructure where revisions of the thing can be released, distributed, tested, and installed to target systems; 3) the OO feature of the Perl language where a user can interact with a thing (e.g. download a TV series poster or trailer, etc). Of course, none of the above suggest that a generic representation like "Acme::Thing" is better than a more specific one, e.g. "WebService::ISBNDB" for books. HOMEPAGE Please visit the project's homepage at . SOURCE Source repository is at . SEE ALSO DefHash AUTHOR perlancar CONTRIBUTING To contribute, you can send patches by email/via RT, or send pull requests on GitHub. Most of the time, you don't need to build the distribution yourself. You can simply modify the code, then test via: % prove -l If you want to build the distribution (e.g. to try to install it locally on your system), you can install Dist::Zilla, Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::Author::PERLANCAR, Pod::Weaver::PluginBundle::Author::PERLANCAR, and sometimes one or two other Dist::Zilla- and/or Pod::Weaver plugins. Any additional steps required beyond that are considered a bug and can be reported to me. COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE This software is copyright (c) 2023 by perlancar . This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself. BUGS Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a patch to an existing test-file that illustrates the bug or desired feature.