New versions of Perl and of Mojolicious, one of its real-time web application frameworks have been released within a couple of days of one another.

In his announcement of Perl 5.20, Ricardo Signes points out that it:

represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl 5.18.0 and contains approximately 470,000 lines of changes across 2,900 files from 124 authors

all of whom are credited. 

Perl 5.20 has a  new slice syntax whereby %hash{...} and %array[...] syntax returns a list of key/value (or index/value) pairs. It introduces two experimental features which have been welcomed enthusiastically by Dave Farrell on Perl Tricks:

Subroutine signatures

This is the big one. It's hard to understate how great this is. No more ugly assignment code - with 5.20 you can write:

Postfix dereferencing

The next cool new feature is postfix dereferencing. Hard to describe but easy to show:

Farell also reports:

Perl 5.20 compiles on Android! The current documentation is online, and will be accessible via "perldoc android" once you've installed 5.20.

Perl News also lists the following enhancements: 

• Unicode 6.3 now supported
• New \p{Unicode} regular expression pattern property
• More consistent prototype parsing
• More locale initialization fallback options
• rand now uses a consistent random number generator
• subs now take a prototype attribute
• use locale now works on UTF-8 locales
• use locale now compiles on systems without locale ability
• -DL runtime option now added for tracing locale setting
• -F now implies -a and -a implies -n
• $a and $b warnings exemption
• Better 64-bit support

There is also a new release of a Perl app framework. Mojolicious is real-time web application framework, written in Perl by Sebastian Riedel, based on his previous experience developing Catalyst. It is described as having: 

"Out-of-the-box support for RESTful routes, plugins, commands Perl-ish templates, session management, form validation, testing framework, static file server and full Unicode support."

In a recent interview, Catalyst's co-maintainer Matt S. Trout said of Mojolicious that it
"has a very well-documented staged back compatible breakage policy which they stick to religiously, and a “move fast and break stuff” style application development",

In his blog post about the new Mojolicious 5.0 release Sebastian Riedel includes the following in his list of the highlights:

• New exception and not_found pages:

• Extensible form validation with CRSF (cross-site request forgery) protection
• Template variants - to make your application look good on different devices use the variant stash value to choose between different variants of your templates.
• New Mojo::DOM with support for many different node types and new ways to manipulate HTML
• A new way to do zero downtime restarts and high performance web servers using the SO_REUSEPORT socket option
• A new way to reuse non-blocking code
•  A new spin-off project Minion - a Mango job queue

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