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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_perl

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Greetings, Perlers. This delayed-one-week-by-OSCON mailing is the Perl.com
newsletter, now with an infinite amount more cool announcements than last
time. (OK, even one more cool announcement is infinite growth. Math's fun
that way.)

Here's what's new in the world of Perl this baker's fortnight.

* Perl News

Perl 6 summarizer Ann Barcomb continued her march through the 2006 archives,
summarizing April and May. Well done!

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/30391

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/30480

The Perl Foundation posted the three bids for YAPC::NA 2007: Boston,
Philadelphia, and Houston:

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2006/08/bids_posted.html

Best Practical (home of RT and SVK) hosted a Devel::Cover hackathon, making
fantastic progress:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1918204

The Perl Foundation gave White Camel awards to Josh McAdams, Jay Hannah,
and Randal Schwartz:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1920249

Adam Kennedy called for CPAN testers for Strawberry Perl. This is very
important for Windows Perl users:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/31/1750250

The Catalyst project launched Planet Catalyst, an aggregator of
Catalyst-related news and information:

http://planet.catalystframework.org/

* 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.

Audrey Tang suggests a few tasks in the Pugs repository
(http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs/):

* The "runpugs" idea still needs pickup: Basically, write (or find) a
generic, line-buffered web/terminal bridge that hooks something like IPC::Run
with a web-based terminal display, with, for example, HTML::FromANSI for
display, so we can have a Pugs shell online for people to play with.

* Look at directories under t/; move or merge the incoming tests
under xx-uncategorized/ to the directory to which they belong. In addition
to that, try to reorganize the increasingly overlapping and incoherent
directory-naming scheme a bit, perhaps grouped by synopses names (see
doc/Perl6/Spec/) and then by section names as subdirectories.

* We already have "evalbot" under examples/network/; if Pugs build
fails, currently it simply uses the last-known-good version of ./pugs binary.
However, it would be great for the bot to report a build failure (perhaps
with nopasted log) on the channel.

* Spellcheck and POD format docs/Perl6/Overview/*.pod.

Join #perl6 on irc.freenode.net for more information.

Andy Lester suggests a few Parrot tasks:

* External functions and variables must have names that begin with Parrot_.

* Fix non-symbol-table namespace pollution in public headers (in
include/parrot/), used by embedders and extenders. They must not declare or
define any symbol that isn't clearly Parrot-specific. Prefixing symbols with
Parrot_ or PARROT_ is the easiest and safest way, but it can lead to a lot of
verbosity, so Chip is willing to entertain exceptions or new conventions.

* Any of the CAGE tasks in Parrot's RT are up for grabs:

http://xrl.us/owsd

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

Visualize yourself on a beach, relaxing, with the surf pooling around your
toes and a cold drink in hand. Then visualize objects and classes and state
changes flying around your head. That's right; a picture of your program can
save you time debugging and developing. If you've ever had to decipher
exactly how a program flowed as it executed, pay attention: Phil Crow shows
how to generate sequence diagrams for Perl (and even Java) almost
automatically, with the UML::Sequence module:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/08/03/sequence-diagrams.html

In other news, your editor argued that open languages such as Perl 1, 5, and 6
need open test suites. We win!

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

He also reviewed Class::Trait and explained why traits and roles are important
components of good, modern, object-oriented systems:

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

Piers Cawley admitted that Perl 5 < Ruby < Perl 6, at least for now:

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

Curtis Poe argued that people are an often neglected part of project
management:

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

... then promoted some of his undead, open source projects:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/undead_projects.html>

Andy Lester pondered the challenges of opening a closed project:

<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/07/more_on_the_effects_of_open_so.html>

There's a rumor going around that a certain Mr. Larry Wall might provide the
text of his State of the Onion speech soon. Hmm, that would fit nicely with
the redesigned Perl.com, wouldn't it?

By the way, if you have any feedback or suggestions about the page's new
look- including how to make all of the information we have more accessible
and available, your editor's mailbox is always open. Always.

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

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O'Reilly 2006 Photoshop Cook-Off

Inside Lightroom Announcing the 2006 O'Reilly Photoshop Cook-Off:
a contest open to U.S. residents who use Adobe Photoshop. Win great
prizes and get your work in front of the industry's A-list judges.
Entries accepted from May 15 until August 15, 2006. Enter now to win!

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/contest/

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*** 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 @ 6:23 PM