Monday, November 20, 2006
Post-Hackathon Notes
Perl.com update
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Greetings, Perl.com readers. This is the biweekly Perl.com mailing,
intended to pull you back into the world of Perl if you've had to swim in
the heady waters of technology in general. With that strained and
bloviated introduction, here's what's useful.
* Perl Events
The London Perl Workshop is coming:
http://london.pm.org/lpw
So is the Open Source Developers Conference (hooray, Australia!):
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/10/1111254
* Perl News
Chris Dolan generously donated time and equipment and effort to record
video of many of the presentations at this summer's YAPC::NA in Chicago.
Among plenty of work hacking Perl::Critic (and, your editor assumes, a
very full day job), he's begun to release these videos to the world at large:
http://www.media-landscape.com/yapc
Parrot pumpking Chip Salzenberg released Parrot 0.4.7, "Caique". Your
editor particularly recommends the new Parrot::Embed module for Perl 5:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/15/1643225
Speaking of Chip, Josh McAdams and Perlcast recently interviewed the once
and current pumpking:
http://www.perlcast.com/audio/Perlcast_Interview_036.mp3
Michael Schwern thinks you should record Perl tutorial screencasts:
http://use.perl.org/~schwern/journal/31635
David Landgren has summarized the weeks in Perl 5:
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/2257248
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/16/1334256
Your editor has minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31558
http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31647
* Perl Jobs
The Pugs and Parrot projects each maintain a small 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.
For Pugs and Perl 6 hackers, this fortnight's task is to log onto the IRC
channel #perl6 in irc.freenode.net and talk to Flavio S. Glock (fglock)
about how you can help him with MiniPerl6. This is a cut-down set of
features of Perl 6 which can bootstrap the full version of Perl 6.
MiniPerl6 right now compiles down to Perl 5 and can run at almost full
speed on a standard Perl 5 installation.
Perl 5 hackers and people who know or are willing to learn Perl 6 can help
refine the code.
For Parrot hackers, there are plenty of Perl 5 tasks and minor C tasks,
including refactoring away duplicate code in the test suite, making the C
code adhere to coding standards, and reviewing the state of the design
documents. See the list of open tickets at http://xrl.us/owsd or check in
on IRC in #parrot on irc.perl.org.
* Perl on ORN
Tony Stubblebine attended a Salesforce.com miniconference and found its
new AppExchange platform very interesting. It compelled him to explore
exactly what it takes to put together a hosted business application. As it
turns out, it's very easy. He's even provided a small snippet of relevant
Perl code:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/11/13/an-introduction-to-saleforcecoms-appexchange.html
Ann Barcomb summarized the weeks in Perl 6:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/weekly_perl_6_mailing_list_sum_9.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/weekly_perl_6_mailing_list_sum_10.html
Dave Cross announced the London Perl Workshop 2006:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/london_perl_workshop_2006.html
Jeremy Jones wondered how political shifts in the U.S. Congress might
affect the world of technology:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/is_a_democratically_controlled.html
Your editor went to the Chicago Perl Hackathon and reported his experiences:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/11/pushing_the_caique_out_the_doo.html
Now he will spend his weekend recovering from flight delays,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
Hash Crash Course
Most explanations of hashes use the metaphor of a dictionary. Most
real-world code uses hashes for far different purposes. Simon Cozens
explores some patterns of hashes for counting, uniqueness, caching,
searching, set operations, and dispatching.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/11/02/all-about-hashes.html
***
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
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http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/08/03/sequence-diagrams.html
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Still More Perl Lightning Articles
Perl lightning articles are short, direct, and full of electrifying
practical information. This time, Steven Philip Schubiger demonstrates how
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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
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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
***
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