There are many ways to write Object Oriented code in Perl. In this screencast we'll see how to do that using Moose.

We start with the most basic example and create a script called person.pl with the following content:

use strict; use warnings; use v5.10; use Person; my $teacher = Person->new;

Here we load the Person module, which declares the Person class and then call the new constructor of that class to create and instance, or object that we assign to the $teacher variable.

The implementation of the Person class using Moose is very simple. We just need to create a file called Person.pm with the following content:

package Person; use Moose; 1;

package Person; declares the Person namespace. Then we load Moose and we end the module with the mandatory true value.

With just this code, Moose already provides a constructor for us. We can now run the person.pl script.

A word about layout if both files are in the same directory, and if your are in that directory when you run the script then this should just work fine:

dir/ person.pl Person.pm

First attribute

Of course having just a constructor is not very interesting so in the next example we will have an attribute called name with the appropriate setter and getter methods. The person.pl script, that uses the new version of the class looks like this:

use strict; use warnings; use v5.10; use Person; my $teacher = Person->new; $teacher->name('Foo'); say $teacher->name;

Here, after creating the Person object using the new constructor, we call the name method on the $teacher object. Because we also passed a value to the method, it acts as a setter and sets the name attribute of the $teacher object to be 'Foo'.

On the next line we call the same name method, but this time we don't pass any value. In this case the method acts as a getter and returns the previously assigned value. 'Foo' in this case.

This is what we need to write in the Person.pm file in order to have the attribute and the getter/setter method:

package Person; use Moose; has 'name' => (is => 'rw'); 1;

That's it. By adding has 'name' => (is => 'rw'); we told Moose this class (and every object created from this class) will have an attribute called 'name'. This attribute need an accessor which can both read and write (That's what the 'rw' tells it). Which means Moose will create a method called name that is both a getter (to read) and a setter (to write) the value of the attribute.

Attributes in the constructor

Not only has Moose created a getter/setter accessor, it also changed the constructor, so we can already pass the value of name when we create the object using new. That way, we can create a new instance of the Person class and it will already have the name attribute set. See the new version of the person.pl script:

use strict; use warnings; use v5.10; use Person; my $teacher = Person->new( name => 'Foo' ); say $teacher->name;