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Greetings from the Post-YAPC Hackathon, everyone.
This week has been interesting. YAPC::NA is always worth
your time
(<http://www.yapcchicag
o.org/> has what you may have missed this year);
it's full of interesting people, interesting projects, and
interesting
ideas.
This year's trends included inside-out objects, Perl 6
implementations
(way more on that later), web frameworks, and plenty of
discussions on
how to take advantage of other technologies, including JSON
and Ajax.
* The State of Perl
Of course, gathering some of the leaders in the Perl
community always
leads to discussions of the state and future of Perl, both
Perl 5 and
Perl 6. (Then again, Michael Schwern, your editor, and
Allison Randal
have all hacked on parts of Perl 1 over the past couple of
years, so
perhaps the world is larger than you may have imagined.)
Looking at all of the interesting and useful things people
are doing--and
the fact that a significant portion of the 400+ attendees
this year have
never been to a Perl conference before--the future looks
bright.
That doesn't mean that the future is easy, however. The
Perl
implementations need more hackers. Perl needs much better
evangelism,
not just to attract existing Perl programmers to the vibrant
Perl
communities available (Perl Monks, Perl Mongers, Perl
conferences, et
cetera), to contribute to useful and free Perl projects
(Perl 5, Perl 6,
Pugs, Parrot, and the CPAN), but to promote Perl as a useful
and vibrant
language and platform.
That's where you come in.
TPF president Bill Odom is looking for case studies. TPF
public
relations manager Andy Lester is looking for success
stories. Your
local Perl Mongers group is looking for new members, and
there are
dozens of wonderful projects in various stages of ideas and
completion
that could use a couple of hours of attention every month.
If you use Perl successfully, tell your friends! Tell Bill
(<wnodom tmtowtdi.com>) and Andy (<prperlfoundation.org>). Find a
Perl mongers group!
If you (or your friends and colleagues) want an interesting
technical
challenge, Parrot and Perl 5 and Pugs can always use
hackers. You
could implement your own language (PGE and TGE already look
like
best-of-breed tools), resurrect an old machine for
smoke-testing on
exotic platforms, or even learn how to work on a large
project by
volunteering with a janitor project.
Another recurring thread of discussion is the exotic and, in
retrospect,
obvious work of porting some of the wonderful new features
of Perl 6
to Perl 5. In particular, Stevan Little's Class::MOP and
Moose provide
a workable and usable metamodel for Perl 5 and will probably
form the
metamodel for Perl 6.
They're usable today. They're only some of the excellent
features
making their way to Perl 5 today. Perl 5.10 will include
plenty of
other features (defined-or, smart-match, lexical pragmas).
You can
start to play with Perl 6 features today even without using
Pugs or
Parrot!
Your editor took copious notes on several interesting
projects and
discussions, but due to the state of the wireless network
didn't
have a chance to publish them yet. Don't fret. They'll
be online soon.
* Perl on ORN
Database and Perl hacker David Wheeler recently benchmarked
some
Perl code versus stored procedures in PostgreSQL. It turns
out that
PL/pgSQL can be fast and maintainable and clear and even
correct.
Here's how to manage many-to-many relationships by marring
Perl and
PostgreSQL stored procedures:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pu
b/a/onlamp/2006/06/29/many-to-many-with-plpgsql.html>
Your editor has finally finished his 30-post series (yep,
still crazy),
which documents his work refactoring the legacy Perl system.
Here's
what the project taught him.
<http://www.oreillynet.com/o
nlamp/blog/2006/06/refactoring_everything_retrosp.html>
He also reviewed Class::MOP. Ooh, synergy:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onla
mp/blog/2006/06/cpan_module_review_classmop.html>
Then he gave two different thoughts on the continued
viability of Perl
5 and Perl 6:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/
06/come_back_zinc.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/o
nlamp/blog/2006/06/how_does_a_programming_languag.html>
Nat Torkington attended both YAPC and the Rails Conf.
Here's what
he thought:
<http://radar.oreilly.com/archiv
es/2006/06/a_week_in_chicago_with_rails_p.html>
Jeremy Jones ported a "Perl Hacks" hack from
Perl to Python. Cool:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/o
nlamp/blog/2006/06/hacking_a_perl_hack_for_python.html>
A good name for a project is Pomegranate,
-- c
chromaticoreilly.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
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August 15, 2006. Enter now to win!
http://digit
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*** Featured Articles ***
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.ht
ml>
***
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.ht
ml>
***
Advanced Subroutine Techniques
Subroutines seem like a basic building block of code.
They're simple
and easy to understand and use, right? That's true--but
there are a
few advanced techniques to make your code more maintainable
and
robust. Rob Kinyon goes beyond making sense of subroutines
to making
subroutines work for you.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/23/advanced_
subroutines.html>
***
Managing Rich Data Structures
Perl is so good at handling plain text files that it's
seductively
easy to use them when you need something better. Yet
sometimes using
a full-fledged database is just Too Much Work. If only Dave
Baker had
written an article on using complex, persistent data
structures with
MLDBM.
<h
ttp://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/16/mldbm.html>
***
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