Friday, June 30, 2006
Camels over Chicago
Perl.com update
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Greetings from the Post-YAPC Hackathon, everyone.
This week has been interesting. YAPC::NA is always worth your time
(<http://www.yapcchicago.org/> has what you may have missed this year);
it's full of interesting people, interesting projects, and interesting
ideas.
This year's trends included inside-out objects, Perl 6 implementations
(way more on that later), web frameworks, and plenty of discussions on
how to take advantage of other technologies, including JSON and Ajax.
* The State of Perl
Of course, gathering some of the leaders in the Perl community always
leads to discussions of the state and future of Perl, both Perl 5 and
Perl 6. (Then again, Michael Schwern, your editor, and Allison Randal
have all hacked on parts of Perl 1 over the past couple of years, so
perhaps the world is larger than you may have imagined.)
Looking at all of the interesting and useful things people are doing--and
the fact that a significant portion of the 400+ attendees this year have
never been to a Perl conference before--the future looks bright.
That doesn't mean that the future is easy, however. The Perl
implementations need more hackers. Perl needs much better evangelism,
not just to attract existing Perl programmers to the vibrant Perl
communities available (Perl Monks, Perl Mongers, Perl conferences, et
cetera), to contribute to useful and free Perl projects (Perl 5, Perl 6,
Pugs, Parrot, and the CPAN), but to promote Perl as a useful and vibrant
language and platform.
That's where you come in.
TPF president Bill Odom is looking for case studies. TPF public
relations manager Andy Lester is looking for success stories. Your
local Perl Mongers group is looking for new members, and there are
dozens of wonderful projects in various stages of ideas and completion
that could use a couple of hours of attention every month.
If you use Perl successfully, tell your friends! Tell Bill
(<wnodom@tmtowtdi.com>) and Andy (<pr@perlfoundation.org>). Find a
Perl mongers group!
If you (or your friends and colleagues) want an interesting technical
challenge, Parrot and Perl 5 and Pugs can always use hackers. You
could implement your own language (PGE and TGE already look like
best-of-breed tools), resurrect an old machine for smoke-testing on
exotic platforms, or even learn how to work on a large project by
volunteering with a janitor project.
Another recurring thread of discussion is the exotic and, in retrospect,
obvious work of porting some of the wonderful new features of Perl 6
to Perl 5. In particular, Stevan Little's Class::MOP and Moose provide
a workable and usable metamodel for Perl 5 and will probably form the
metamodel for Perl 6.
They're usable today. They're only some of the excellent features
making their way to Perl 5 today. Perl 5.10 will include plenty of
other features (defined-or, smart-match, lexical pragmas). You can
start to play with Perl 6 features today even without using Pugs or
Parrot!
Your editor took copious notes on several interesting projects and
discussions, but due to the state of the wireless network didn't
have a chance to publish them yet. Don't fret. They'll be online soon.
* Perl on ORN
Database and Perl hacker David Wheeler recently benchmarked some
Perl code versus stored procedures in PostgreSQL. It turns out that
PL/pgSQL can be fast and maintainable and clear and even correct.
Here's how to manage many-to-many relationships by marring Perl and
PostgreSQL stored procedures:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/06/29/many-to-many-with-plpgsql.html>
Your editor has finally finished his 30-post series (yep, still crazy),
which documents his work refactoring the legacy Perl system. Here's
what the project taught him.
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/refactoring_everything_retrosp.html>
He also reviewed Class::MOP. Ooh, synergy:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/cpan_module_review_classmop.html>
Then he gave two different thoughts on the continued viability of Perl
5 and Perl 6:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/come_back_zinc.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/how_does_a_programming_languag.html>
Nat Torkington attended both YAPC and the Rails Conf. Here's what
he thought:
<http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/a_week_in_chicago_with_rails_p.html>
Jeremy Jones ported a "Perl Hacks" hack from Perl to Python. Cool:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/06/hacking_a_perl_hack_for_python.html>
A good name for a project is Pomegranate,
-- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
FEAR-less Site Scraping
Many web programmers talk about "domain-specific languages" as if
defining functions and methods were a new discovery. A real domain-
specific language provides concise syntax and symatics for a
particular purpose, such as Yung-chung Lin's FEAR::API. He explains
how this toolkit allows you to scrape, modify, store, and re-present
web data easily, effectively, and economically.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/06/01/fear-api.html>
***
Charting Data at the Bottom of the World
Alex Gough has a curious job. He's the only programmer for 500 miles
at a remote Antarctic research station. His problems are like your
problems too, though--gathering, manipulating, recording, and displaying
data. Here's how he uses several CPAN modules to make pretty charts
and graphs with almost no work.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/05/04/charting-data.html>
***
Unraveling Code with the Debugger
Reading other people's code can be difficult, especially if you have
no idea what happens when and where. Understanding code flow is vital
to maintenance and bug fixes, but littering code with print and
debugging statements is tedious and prone to error. There's another
way: use the debugger! Daniel Allen demonstrates how to pinpoint a
problem with Perl's debugger.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/04/06/debugger.html>
***
Using Ajax from Perl
The recently rediscovered Ajax technique makes the client side of
web programming much more useful and pleasant. However, it also means
revising your existing web applications to take advantage of this new
power. Dominic Mitchell shows how to use CGI::Ajax to give your Perl
applications access to this new power.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/03/02/ajax_and_perl.html>
***
Advanced Subroutine Techniques
Subroutines seem like a basic building block of code. They're simple
and easy to understand and use, right? That's true--but there are a
few advanced techniques to make your code more maintainable and
robust. Rob Kinyon goes beyond making sense of subroutines to making
subroutines work for you.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/23/advanced_subroutines.html>
***
Managing Rich Data Structures
Perl is so good at handling plain text files that it's seductively
easy to use them when you need something better. Yet sometimes using
a full-fledged database is just Too Much Work. If only Dave Baker had
written an article on using complex, persistent data structures with
MLDBM.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/16/mldbm.html>
***
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