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Hiya, camel herders. You've reached the introductory
paragraph of the
Perl newsletter, cleverly hidden in the middle of this
mailing. Give
yourself a Parrot Magic Cookie.
Here's what's new in the world of Perl this fortnight.
* Perl Events
Is there any lovelier time to visit Chicago than the end of
fall? Maybe,
but if you do it the weekend of November 10-12, you can
participate in the
Chicago Hackathon 2006. This is an opportunity for all
midwest hackers to
help their favorite Perl 5, Perl 6, and Parrot projects by
meeting in
person and getting stuff done:
http://hackathon.info/
* Perl News
Jonathan Worthington announced a new and large Perl 6 FAQ
available from
Programmer's Heaven:
http://w
ww.programmersheaven.com/2/Perl6-FAQ
David Landgren has summarized the weeks in Perl 5:
h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/1217252
h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/19/1230210
Ann Barcomb has summarized the weeks in Perl 6:
ht
tp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/107236
Your editor has minuted the Perl 6 design meetings:
h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/13/1515244
http://u
se.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/31371
Audrey Tang released Pugs 6.2.13 after four months of
development:
h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/1522216
Mark Leighton Fisher announced the new pmtools-perl6 mailing
list for
discussing pure Perl tools written in Perl 6:
h
ttp://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/18/1742254
* Perl Jobs
The Pugs and Parrot projects each maintain a short 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.
In the world of Parrot, the best and brightest task this
week is to choose
a portion of a Parrot Design Document, read through it, and
make sure it
has comprehensive tests. You need to know little more than
Perl and
English to accomplish this. If you have a couple of hours
free and this
sounds interesting, send a message to parrot-porters perl.org
or ask in
#parrot on irc.perl.org.
* Perl on ORN
Processing large volumes of IO requests requires changing
the way you
think about designing your software. Traditional approaches
use blocking
IO, where you can wait until you read the entire request
before processing
it. Another option is to use asynchronous IO with
event-based systems.
Does that sentence mean little to you? That's OK. Stas
Bekman
demonstrates what this means with actual, working Perl code,
while
describing how the MailChannels team fights spam:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/10
/12/asynchronous_events.html
CGI::Application is a venerable system for building
effective, powerful,
and maintainable web applications in Perl. With the release
of version
4.0, it suddenly became even more powerful. Mark Stosberg
shows off some
of the new features. If you're stuck in the CGI.pm days or
just want a
new way to write applications, this is for you:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/10/19/cgi_application.ht
ml
Do you administrate a MySQL server full- or part-time?
Baron Schwartz
reviewed some of the most useful add-on tools, including
plenty of Perl.
Yes, we love our databases:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mysql/2006/10/1
9/mysql-tools.html
Speaking of hackathons (several paragraphs earlier), Steve
Holden recently
helped put together a couple of well-regarded sprints for
the Python
community. He wrote about his experiences organizing and
participating in
such events to help other people decide when and how to host
them and what
to expect if they participate:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2006/10/19
/running-a-sprint.html
Your editor questioned the conventional "wisdom"
of writing baby-talk code
for novice maintainers to read:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/
blog/2006/10/see_spot_code_code_spot_code.html
... and then asked why bugs tend to clump together in a
system:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/bl
og/2006/10/why_do_bugs_clump_together.html
Nitesh Dhanjani reminded everyone of more security
vulnerabilities found
through Google Code Search:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlam
p/blog/2006/10/using_google_code_search_to_fi.html
Curtis Poe showed how to use Class::Trait to maintain state
in a program:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlam
p/blog/2006/10/using_traits_to_maintain_state.html
See you in Chicago,
- c
chromaticoreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
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.ht
ml
***
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
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-diagram
s.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-artic
les.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.
ht
tp://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
***
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