Monday, October 23, 2006
See You in Chicago
Perl.com update
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Hiya, camel herders. You've reached the introductory paragraph of the
Perl newsletter, cleverly hidden in the middle of this mailing. Give
yourself a Parrot Magic Cookie.
Here's what's new in the world of Perl this fortnight.
* Perl Events
Is there any lovelier time to visit Chicago than the end of fall? Maybe,
but if you do it the weekend of November 10-12, you can participate in the
Chicago Hackathon 2006. This is an opportunity for all midwest hackers to
help their favorite Perl 5, Perl 6, and Parrot projects by meeting in
person and getting stuff done:
http://hackathon.info/
* Perl News
Jonathan Worthington announced a new and large Perl 6 FAQ available from
Programmer's Heaven:
http://www.programmersheaven.com/2/Perl6-FAQ
David Landgren has summarized the weeks in Perl 5:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/1217252
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/19/1230210
Ann Barcomb has summarized the weeks in Perl 6:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/107236
Your editor has minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/13/1515244
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31371
Audrey Tang released Pugs 6.2.13 after four months of development:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/1522216
Mark Leighton Fisher announced the new pmtools-perl6 mailing list for
discussing pure Perl tools written in Perl 6:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/18/1742254
* Perl Jobs
The Pugs and Parrot projects each maintain a short list of tasks for
programmers interested in spending an hour or two helping out. You often
don't have to know much about either project or much beyond Perl 5.
In the world of Parrot, the best and brightest task this week is to choose
a portion of a Parrot Design Document, read through it, and make sure it
has comprehensive tests. You need to know little more than Perl and
English to accomplish this. If you have a couple of hours free and this
sounds interesting, send a message to parrot-porters@perl.org or ask in
#parrot on irc.perl.org.
* Perl on ORN
Processing large volumes of IO requests requires changing the way you
think about designing your software. Traditional approaches use blocking
IO, where you can wait until you read the entire request before processing
it. Another option is to use asynchronous IO with event-based systems.
Does that sentence mean little to you? That's OK. Stas Bekman
demonstrates what this means with actual, working Perl code, while
describing how the MailChannels team fights spam:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/10/12/asynchronous_events.html
CGI::Application is a venerable system for building effective, powerful,
and maintainable web applications in Perl. With the release of version
4.0, it suddenly became even more powerful. Mark Stosberg shows off some
of the new features. If you're stuck in the CGI.pm days or just want a
new way to write applications, this is for you:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/10/19/cgi_application.html
Do you administrate a MySQL server full- or part-time? Baron Schwartz
reviewed some of the most useful add-on tools, including plenty of Perl.
Yes, we love our databases:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mysql/2006/10/19/mysql-tools.html
Speaking of hackathons (several paragraphs earlier), Steve Holden recently
helped put together a couple of well-regarded sprints for the Python
community. He wrote about his experiences organizing and participating in
such events to help other people decide when and how to host them and what
to expect if they participate:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2006/10/19/running-a-sprint.html
Your editor questioned the conventional "wisdom" of writing baby-talk code
for novice maintainers to read:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/see_spot_code_code_spot_code.html
... and then asked why bugs tend to clump together in a system:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/why_do_bugs_clump_together.html
Nitesh Dhanjani reminded everyone of more security vulnerabilities found
through Google Code Search:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/using_google_code_search_to_fi.html
Curtis Poe showed how to use Class::Trait to maintain state in a program:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/10/using_traits_to_maintain_state.html
See you in Chicago,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application
Perl has a wealth of good web frameworks. One of the season's toolkits,
CGI::Application, has recently seen a bout of new development to make
building web apps faster and much easier. Mark Stosberg demonstrates these
new features and how to use them.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/10/19/cgi_application.html
***
The State of the Onion 10
In Larry Wall's tenth annual State of the Onion address, he talks about
raising children and programming languages and balancing competing
tensions and irreconcilable desires.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/09/21/onion.html
***
Generating UML and Sequence Diagrams
Sometimes a picture can save you thousands of words of description--and
debugging. A sequence diagram shows the flow of methods and function calls
between modules. Perl lets you generate these almost automatically for
Perl code--or even Java. Phil Crow shows how to use UML::Sequence.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/08/03/sequence-diagrams.html
***
Still More Perl Lightning Articles
Perl lightning articles are short, direct, and full of electrifying
practical information. This time, Steven Philip Schubiger demonstrates how
to convert crufty MakeMaker installation scripts into shiny pure-Perl
installers, Phil Crow demonstrates the use of Java's powerful Swing UI
toolkit from Perl, Joshua McAdams explains how to turn any module into a
script, and chromatic removes duplication from test suites.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/07/13/lightning-articles.html
***
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
***
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