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Hello, Camel fans. (Even Alpaca and Llama fans are OK too.) This
is the bi-mon-perl-com newsletter. Be here and be square. This
once-every-two-weeks mailing is a shameless plea to keep you up to
date on the latest news and events in the world of Perl. Here we go.

* Perl News

Jesse Vincent and the Best Practical team launched Hiveminder, a shared
todo list service built with Perl and Jifty (of course):

<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08/0249201>

Chip Salzenberg released Parrot 0.4.6, featuring a resurrected Cardinal
(Ruby on Parrot):

<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/10/1724250>

Ars Technical picked up the release announcement and made it part of a
nice little story on virtual machines:

<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060810-7462.html>

Ann Barcomb summarized the activity on the Perl 6 lists for July 2006 in
two parts:

<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/13/1853228>
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/13/1851229>

Bleadperl pumpking (that means "person in charge of producing and
releasing the next major version of Perl") Rafael Garcia-Suarez released
Perl 5.9.4, a development version for testing:

<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/15/1611254>

Chicago.pm adopted a camel:

<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/18/1812235>

YAPC::Europe is a week and a half away. Make your way to Birmingham, U.K. soon!

Perlcast resurrected its Perl News Summary series with guest anchor Randal Schwartz:

<http://perlcast.com/2006/08/16/perl-news-2006-08-14/>

* 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.

The RT queue (<http://xrl.us/owsd>) for the Parrot Cage Cleaners contains
a few starting points:

* #39878 -- always include timezone information in generated files

* #39877 -- fix some incorrectly succeeding MANIFEST tests

* #40032 -- fix a missing prototype error in C code

* #40059 -- namespace external functions and variable names in C code

* #40072 -- allow the use of SVK in maintainer utilities

Contact andy@perl.org if you are interested.

Remember, you don't have to know C or Perl 6 (yet) to help.

* Perl on ORN

Handling text is easy; a file is just a big blob of characters, and what
works on one platform works on all platforms... right? Even such a simple
concept as a newline is complex if you look at it from the computer's
point of view. Perl does a lot of magic underneath to help you read a line
at a time from a file, but sometimes it can only guess. Xavier Noria's
"Understanding Newlines" will help you figure out what's really
happening--especially if you want your code to work across platforms:

<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/08/17/understanding-newlines.html>

Your editor borrowed a great tip from David Golden on the Perl QA mailing
list about making it trivial to update your .vimrc file:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/make_your_vimrc_trivial_to_upd_1.html>

Kevin Shockey reminisced about his experience speaking at OSCON:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/post_oscon_i_the_darker_side_o.html>

Victor Rodriguez interviewed Curtis "Ovid" Poe:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/people_of_perl_ovid.html>

The same Curtis "Ovid" Poe argued that sometimes you cannot afford not to
fix bugs:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/why_expensive_bugs_are_cheap_t.html>

... and then worked through the Jifty Tutorial, documenting his thoughts
as he went along:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/hey_thats_pretty_jifty_er_nift.html>

Packing his passport and finding some Euros,

- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera

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The First European RailsConf 2006 - September 14-15 – London

Learn why Ruby on Rails is taking Europe by Storm! Find out what's new
cool and exciting from more than 25 leading web 2.0 experts, including
David Heinemeier Hansson - creator of Rails, Pragmatic Programmer Dave
Thomas, Rake author Jim Weirich, Why the Lucky Stiff and more!
http://www.oreilly.com/go/railsconf_linux

===================================================================

*** Featured Articles ***

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>

***

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>

***

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# posted by giu @ 5:26 PM