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Hello, readers. This is the Perl newsletter, a twice-a-month mailing from
the O'Reilly Network to keep you up to date with the latest news and
articles from the world of Perl. Here's what you need to know.

* Perl Events

Damian Conway will give his Perl Best Practices talk in Portugal next week
as well as his Life, the Universe, and Everything talk:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/05/195237

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop will take place in Pittsburgh on Saturday, 23
September. There's more information available online, including registration:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/29/032245
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/08/1111204

YAPC::EU and YAPC::NA 2007 will take place in Vienna, Austria and Houston,
Texas, USA:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/01/1524201

* Perl Releases

Windows users, Strawberry Perl 5.8.8 Alpha 2 is out. If you want to be
able to compile your own extensions with purely free software, this is the
Perl distribution for you:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/29/0655233

* Other Perl News

Josh McAdams and Perlcast interviewed Patrick Michaud, Perl 6 compiler
pumpking. This interview has a lot of great information on PGE, the
parser and compiler that makes Perl 6 on Parrot (and many other languages)
possible. PGE may be Parrot's killer application. Patrick explains why:

http://perlcast.com/2006/08/24/interview-with-patrick-michaud/

Randal Schwartz also covered Perl news through August 2006 for Perlcast:

http://perlcast.com/2006/09/03/perl-news-update-2006-09-01/

Gabor Szabo, creator and maintainer of the CPAN Forum, has added
per-PAUSEID Atom and RSS feeds; if you're a distribution maintainer,
subscribing to the feeds might make CPAN Forum much easier to track:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/30/1723233

Ann Barcomb summarized the month of August in Perl 6:

http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/30702
http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/30769
http://use.perl.org/~kudra/journal/30863

Mark Overmeer and Sam Vilain have requested feedback on the initial design
of a meta-CPAN idea they call CPAN6 (or CPAN^6):

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/08/1110205

* 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.

Pugs now has a much improved test-to-spec cross-referencing visualizer. It
annotates the Synopses documents with the corresponding tests. The source
code is in the Pugs tree as util/smartlink.pl, and its output looks like this:

http://perlcabal.org/syn/

Also see http://pugs.blogs.com/pugs/2006/08/integrating_the.html for more context.

Your task, if you choose to accept it, is:

Most of the tests under t/ are not yet linked to Synopses. One can
easily do that via embedded comments--the t/README file shows how. Please
jump in and start cross-referencing tests so we can find out which parts
of the specs were under-tested, and allow for a much easier test file
reorganization.

In the world of Parrot, the RT queue has plenty of open tickets for you
to peruse:

http://xrl.us/owsd

In particular, good places to start include cleaning up the use of
temporary files in tests
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=37358 , removing
executable code from C header files
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=38929 , and making
Parrot source conform to the new coding standards
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=38969 .

* Perl on ORN

One of the newest, shiniest, and most powerful of the new ideas in Perl 6
is the notion of roles--composable units of object behavior. By
rethinking the nature of types, objects, behavior, and code reuse, Perl 6
may take object-oriented programming in completely new and better
directions. Your editor recently explained the philosophy and use of
roles in Perl 6, explaining some of the problems they address and some of
the power they provide:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/roles_composable_units_of_obje.html

Curtis Poe asked people to stop using Perl 3; or, at least, Perl 3 idioms
in Perl 5:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/please_stop_using_perl_3.html

Your editor asked people to let their zombie software die:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/please_let_your_zombie_softwar.html

Andy Lester announced the first TPF-sponsored Perl hackathon in Chicago in
November (brrr):

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/announcing_the_chicago_perl_ha.html

Several writers went to YAPC::Europe, including Sam Smith and Dave Cross.
They summarized their experiences:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/08/yapceurope.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/yapceu_2006_day_1.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/yapceu_2006_day_2.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/09/yapceu_2006_day_3.html

Watch for a fuller post on the conference next week. Also--Larry's State
of the Onion 10 will come to Perl.com soon.

See you in two weeks,
- 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_perl

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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 @ 5:20 PM