In the next few weeks I'll be starting to gather data for the September 2010 edition of Template Roundup, and so now is your last chance for any requests or suggestions to make it into the report.

Take a look at the previous reports or the list of template engines supported by Template::Benchmark and let me know if there's a template engine you'd particularly want to see benchmarked, or some feature that isn't covered.

You can either make your suggestion in the comments thread below or contact me via the contact page.

I'm quite looking forwards to seeing how well Text::Xslate does this time around, it was far and away the fastest fully-featured template engine in a persistent environment last time, but the recent changelogs suggest some great strides have been made to make it even faster in the past month.

I've failed the Perl Iron Man Challenge again, but I'm still alive, just busy.

I've had a couple of articles semi-written for the past two weeks, but they still very much works-in-progress, because they're about projects that are still... very much in-progress.

So I thought I'd post an interim report in the style of the "What I'm Working On" posts that crop up every so often.

One project is getting Pod::Weaver to do what I want, as mentioned in my previous article, "To Dist::Zilla, or not to Dist::Zilla?", this has involved using Moose for the first time, Pod::Weaver for the first time, Pod::Elemental for the first time, Config::MVP for the first time, and Git for the first time.

Thanks to a bug report by Adam Kennedy for Template::Benchmark, I found myself needing to do some testing on Windows this week.

Now to be clear, I've always loathed using Perl on Windows. I appreciate that some people use it, and I'm of the opinion that I should write my modules to work on it, but I'm happy to never touch it myself.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I downloaded Strawberry Perl for Windows.

Here are my first impressions.

I've just uploaded Template::Benchmark v1.03_02, the first release candidate for v1.04.

This adds two of the features that have been on my long-term goals for this project: custom datasets, and per-feature repeats.

The first lets you supply your own data-structure to use within the benchmark templates (or choose from a presupplied list).

The second lets you choose on a feature-by-feature basis, how often that feature should be used in the generated benchmark template, rather than only choosing how often the entire template would be repeated.

Taken together, these two features allow you far greater control of the generated benchmark, allowing you to tailor it to fit your individual needs with greater precision, read on for more details.

Having gone quiet for a month, I've managed to avoid distraction enough to release a project which had been stubbornly stalled for the past couple of months: a Perl Template Roundup.

Based on Template::Benchmark it's an exhaustive (and exhausting) bunch of benchmarks for a collection of Perl template engines, sliced this way and that way by feature, caching, phase of the moon, and anything else I could measure.