Perl.com update
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Your Skills Are in Demand. More Skills. More Demand.
Choose from 45 webcasts organized by track--JSP, PHP, and
ColdFusion.
Each track has been designed to take advantage of your
existing Web
development skills and includes insightful content
contributed by Dr.
Dobb's and O'Reilly.
http://www.oreill
y.com/go/learn2asp
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Hello, Perl fiends. You're reading the Perl newsletter, a
bi-weekly
mailing that skips across the quiet but deep lake where
oysters lurk.
Here's what's new in the world of Perl.
* Perl News in Brief
The Perl Foundation has awarded maintperl pumpking Nicholas
Clark a grant
to improve Perl 5 in several ways. As a lurker on p5p,
it's heartening to
see the improvements Nicholas has already made as part of
his work on
Ponie. Keep up the good work!
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/23/0323237>
Plans are underway for the third Italian Perl Workshop:
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/26/2136243>
Perlcast has interviewed chronic interviewee brian d foy
about the books
"Intermediate Perl" and "Mastering
Perl":
<http://perlcast.com/2006/
02/16/brian-d-foy-on-intermediate-perl-and-mastering-perl/&g
t;
If you're in the Portland, Oregon area later this month,
come to Powell's
Technical Books on March 25 to meet Allison Randal, Randal
Schwartz, Tom
Phoenix, brian d foy, and your editor for an afternoon
discussion of Perl
and programming and, well, a small stack of books:
<http://w
ww.powells.com/calendar.html#910>
* Perl.com Articles
The word for the month is "practical." (Hey,
that was the word for last
month! Are you seeing a pattern here?)
Rob Kinyon recently covered the basics of subroutine use in
"Making Sense
of Subroutines." Millions of Perl.com readers
experienced enlightenment.
(A few wrote in.) Rob returned to say "Oh, and one
more thing...." This
time, he knows you're ready for more. You're ready for
Advanced
Subroutine Techniques to make your code clearer, cleaner,
and more easily
maintained:
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/23/advanced_
subroutines.html>
Web developers never get it easy, unless you count not
having to write GUI
code (but stay tuned for the next article). To avoid XSS
attacks and get
your data back the way you intended, you have to escape and
unescape it.
Now what happens if your code talks to other web services?
This situation
could quickly get irredeemably ugly. To fix this, send in a
canary.
Robert Spier shows how to encode and unencode only as often
as necessary:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/02/23/
canary_trap.html>
Just when you thought web programming was safe (hey, once
you figure out
multi-value select and checkboxes on the server side,
what's left to
learn?), along comes the term AJAX to resurrect
XmlHTTPRequest from
obscurity and make you learn more and more. (There should
be another
web-related Ajax, so the famous one can be the Locrian king
known for
boastfulness and irreverence toward pessimist prophets.) Of
course,
practical Perl programmers shouldn't have to master the
intricacies of
JavaScript just to make the client side prettier. That's
where Dominic
Mitchell's "Using AJAX from Perl" is useful;
here's the minimum you have
to learn and where to go for more information to give your
already useful
applications the necessary buzzword-ness:
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/03/02/ajax_and_perl.ht
ml>
* Perl.com Status Status Update
Thanks to everyone who responded to the plea for feedback in
the previous
newsletter. There was overwhelming support for interviews
and reviews of
CPAN modules. Watch the site for a review of
XML::XPathEngine and an
interview with Perl 6 pumpking Patrick Michaud... and those
are just the
first two planned.
Your suggestions are still always welcome.
Or are people from Locis "Locrians"?,
- c
chromatic oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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Bill Gates in conversation with Tim O'Reilly and others at
MIX:
Building the Next Web Now
LIVE IN VEGAS. MARCH 20-22: Microsoft's new MIX conference
is for
developers, designers and business professionals who create
consumer-oriented web sites. MIX is a 72-hour conversation
about enhancing
Web-based customer interactions. Attendees will have the
opportunity to
hear Bill Gates, Tim O'Reilly, Amazon and other industry
leaders talk
about the new and unique experiences that can be delivered
over the Web.
MIX will focus on IE7, Windows Vista, Windows Media Center
& Xbox 360,
InfoCard, Windows Presentation Foundation, the
"Atlas" AJAX framework and
Windows Live!
http://www.mix06.com
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*** Featured Articles ***
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>
***
Debugging and Profiling mod_perl Applications
How do you use the debugger on a mod_perl application? How
do you profile
an application embedded in a web server, with multiple child
processes?
Don't worry. Where there's Perl, there's a way. Frank
Wiles demonstrates
how to debug and profile mod_perl applications.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/09/debug_mod_perl.
html>
***
Test-Driving X11 GUIs
Is GUI testing as difficult as it seems? Maybe not, with the
right testing
libraries. George Nistorica shows what X11::GUITest can and
can't do to
make your Unix and Unix-like applications more robust.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/02/x11_gui_testin
g.html>
***
More Advancements in Perl Programming
What's advanced Perl programming? The definition has
changed over the
years. For a while it was XS and GUIs and typeglobs and OO.
Now a lot of
it is using CPAN effectively. Since completing Advanced Perl
Programming,
Second Edition, Simon Cozens has discovered even more ways
to work more
smartly and effectively. Here's what he's learned.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/26/more_advanc
ed_perl.html>
***
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