Breaking API Change in 0.99_17

First, to those who are using 0.99_16 or so, I’m sorry, but this has to be done. Breathe in. Breathe Out. It’s not going to be that bad. :-)
Through all of my tinkering with the Handel::Currency class to do conversions, formatting and integrate inflation into DBIx::Class, I kept feeling the urge to put some parts of it on CPAN because it felt like reusable code. During a few down days, I did just that. Thus, Data::Currency and DBIx::Class::InflateColumn::Currency were born.

During that process, I had a chance to clean up the Handel::Currency API into something more precise for non Handel users. The biggest change was that format is now just a property get/set like code is. It simply sets the preferred format of the current currency object. The act of formatting a currency object into a string has been moved to as_string. This felt sane because format can be verbish and nounish when talking about the currency object, so I chose to make it play the property role. As a matter of old code, stringify now is the same as as_string, rather than returning value.

So, for those using Handel 0.33, nothing is changing. When you upgrade to Handel 1.0, you can still use the Handel::Compat::Currency module if you like. For those of you using a recent version of Handel 0.99_xx, your code will have to change to use as_string instead of format. These changes will be in 0.99_17 once it hits CPAN and should be commited to the repository sometime soon.

I only feel slight bad about that. It is a developer release after all. :-)