I'm really surprised that many Perl people are still puzzled at why Perl web apps aren't as popular, and there isn't as many of them as PHP's.
Guys, in order for a Perl app to build up userbase it...
* Must run on low cost shared hosting
There are ALOT of non-programmer people who are trying to run their own web projects and are starting up with ready, free solutions, that they want to minor-customize themselfs or are willing to pay a little to get small customizations. They most often not doing it for money, or are hoping to get some in the future, but don't have a clear idea on how to at the beginning. And most of them never will make any money, but more people try - more succeed, And those who don't succeed, pass on their accumulated knowledge. Anyways, so, they just get cheap/affordable hosting -- THESE are WordPress, phpBB, etc. users.
On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.
Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6. We know that it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These "Star" releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.
We all love Moose, and the subject of this question could have been rephrased better, but why do I get the feeling that not many people write pure CGI or command-line scripts in Perl (that got executed many times) anymore? After all, didn't Perl begin as a tool for sysadmin and only in the mid 1990's got picked up as the darling of CGI/web programming?
There are still many cases where/reasons why Perl scripts need to be run many times (instead of persistently long running).
If you use Test::Class frequently, sooner or later you'll see the following:
sub startup : Tests(startup => 1) {
my $test = shift;
my $engines = $test->start_engines;
ok $engines->are_running, 'Engines should start OK.';
}
At first blush that looks sensible, but I don't think it is. I'll explain my view of the problem and hope that others can explain why I might be wrong.
The fork function is a very powerful tool used among many languages. Unfortunately It's not that common among Perl scripts, maybe because most scripts don't really have a need for it. But it's a handy trick to keep inside your hat.
Fork creates a new process running the same program, usually the process that calls the fork is named the parent process, and the created process is named the child process. The fork function returns 0 to the child process, and the newly created process pid to the parent. Using fork can be as simple as:
I'd like to offer my place in Bernal Heights Tuesday next week from 7:30pm until whenever for a Raduko Star installation & Perl 6 lightning talks. As some of you know a significant milestone in Perl 6's release history is coming up this Thursday, http://rakudo.org/node/73 and what better way to get through an install than with local PM'ers!
For those that haven't been chez moi we have a basement, bar, projector, wifi, yard, BBQ, etc so we can eat, drink & give presentations. There's space for at least a dozen seated inside, and more outside (for those that can withstand the Day Star).
Who's interested in something like this? How about giving a talk?
Doesn't need powerpoint but we have a screen & sound if you do.
Anything at all raduko/perl6 related seems cool. Ping me off-list and I'll collate.
SWIG is available for some time to create bindings automagically for C and C++ applications. It supports code generation in different languages, including Python, TCL and Perl.
Curiously, in my years of Perl community I can't recall a talk on a YAPC about SWIG, and I can't recall any post on the usual community blogs about it as well. I would be grateful if any experienced XS user could comment on how good (or filth) is this tool and the generated bindings.
I have done very little to the Perl Survey since I got back from Germany. However, finally I've decided how to format and present the report. Mostly with the help of R2HTML and Makefile.
Now that I've worked out how to write the report in a reasonably replicable way (i.e. minimum code differences between revisions of the survey - so running and analysing the 2012 survey should be much much quicker and easier), I should be able to get through a section every day between now and when it's done, then I can call the grant finished!
I've just sent out the speaker mails, which contain all the feedback and evaluations for all the talks. As not all the presentations received feedback, some emails just note that the talk had no responses. If you were a speaker and haven't received a mail (there should be one for every speaker, regardless of the number of talks presented), please let me know, and I'll investigate.
This year YAPC::NA had 305 registered attendees, with 129 of those attendees (amounting to 42%) submitting their responses. Many thanks to the 129 of you who took the time to take the survey, and all those who submitted 441 evaluations for the speakers. It really is very much appreciated.
Also thanks to Curtis Jewell, who suggested an addition to the survey, which will now feature in the YAPC::Europe 2010 Survey and all future surveys. If you have any feedback regarding the survey, or suggestions for questions, or have any questions regarding the surveys themselves, please feel free to contact me at barbie@cpan.org.
Set up a private SVN server on the web with Beanstalk; planning to have it mirrored locally, but until we can get a local one set up, we'll have the web one.
Mason project's going slower than we'd hoped, but we'll see how the rest of today pans out.
Recently we were trying to fix a database performance issue and I had to hit the DBIx::Class irc channel for some advice. Specifically, mysql has an issue where a query with text or blob columns forces a disk sort under certain conditions. Suffice it to say, we hit those conditions with several text columns and benchmarking certain queries showed that removing those columns from a query significantly sped up said queries. That, unfortunately, is a bit tricky under DBIx::Class, but Matt Trout made an excellent suggestion which I later implemented. Why not do a virtual vertical partition of our tables?
Rakudo Star, the first [almost] complete and usable implementation of Perl 6, is expected to be released this Thursday, July 29. It is obvious that the community is looking forward to it as there has been a lot of talking, so the Barcelona Perl Mongers will be celebrating, taking advantage of the fact that it coincides with our monthly meeting.
We have prepared a pretty complete menu to introduce you to Perl 6:
20:00 - entrée: a little tutorial to install Rakudo and Parrot
20:30 - first course: the translation of the Perl 6 presentation in Warszawa.pm
21:00 - second course:Pm's presentation at this year's OSCON
22:00 - desserts:/(sausage|beer)*/ out in the fresh
The chosen venue is the traditional C6-E101 room in the C6 building at UPC's Campus Nord (the same place for those of you who have attended previous mongers parties). If everything goes according to plan, we will even be broadcasting the event.
Edit: Thanks to snarkyboojum for reminding me that it's not fully complete yet, but almost there.
The YAPC::NA 2010 Surveys have now closed. I'm now reviewing the data to produce the emails for speakers, the website pages for results for public consumption and the feedback documents for organsiers. If all goes well expect to see some postings tomorrow.
In addition, I've been refining the scripts that I use to perform the analysis of the results. One aspect that has been missing for the past few years is the output that provides the raw data. I'm please to say that this has now been added. This now means that when I upload the webpages, I can now provide all the data used to perform the analysis for the webpages. Note that the feedback questions and all the talk evaluations are omitted from this data.
Many people are saying that Perl 5 should be renamed. I disagree. Perl is Perl. That's what makes it great. However, I agree that the 5.x version naming is a burden for people who want to advocate the modern relevance of Perl. So, why don't we just drop the "5."?
Perl 12. The current version of Perl is 12.1. That looks right to me. It just fits. Perl 12.x (and 14.x, etc...) just makes more sense because it conveys that Perl is mature (it is) and it has a healthy schedule of stable major releases (it does.)
You may have seen or played with the Smalltalk browser before:
If you have, you'd love it. It makes it trivial to browse through, visualize and manage a project. However, we don't have anything like this for Perl. brian d foy has tried to create a Perl browser (with code on github), but that's the only significant effort in this direction I've seen. Padre has a ticket for a subset of this functionality, but as far as I can tell, it has the same limitation as brian's approach (please correct me if I'm wrong): it's file-based.
Given Perl's dynamic nature, what if we ditched the file-based heuristics and actually examine running code? I've been thinking about this.
I already reported about WxDocular and about the WxPerl course I will give in Pisa. I even wrote about Kephra which will have a new release really soon.
What i want to tell now, touches all these 3 topics. For the WxCourse i write a specialized Editor-App for easy skipping between the many examples, alter and run them and browse some docs. And this App is also the goal, all these examples drive toward. I like the concept of working with life and real purpose code if you really want to learn something useful. The other effect of this selfhosting concept is that most essential information are always at reach for the students.
What do I mean by this? - Over the last 10 years I've given half a dozen or so presentations at conferences, each time someone sets up a video recorder and I think 'great lots of people will hear me present this' (I upload the slides, but it's never the same). Unfortunately each time the work it takes to organise and sort these videos mean they never get uploaded anywhere (have you tried video editing? - it's REALLY slow & hard work).
So, this year (in addition to anything others have organised) I'm going to record my own presentation... and I'm going to use software!
http://silverbackapp.com/ (Mac only - 30 day free trial - this will cover YAPC::EU if you download now! http://camstudio.org/ sounds similar for Windows) lets you record not only what's happening on your screen, but also your audio, and optionally uses the laptops built in camera to record your face (this can be turned off).
Wednesday I gave my roles talk at OSCON (please rate it if you've seen it) and, as usual, I came away learning things from the questions. My favourite, by far, was Perrin Harkins asking whether or not we at the BBC found method conflict resolution to be our greatest win when we switched one system over to roles instead of inheritance.
Today was pizza, hellos, installation of EasyEclipse for each of us, a short Heated Discussion about Eclipse and pros and cons of it, installs of Mason locally and on the server machine, capped off by some testing and promises to work on this tomorrow.
The current plan is to get us versed in Mason and build an example project together. Cross your fingers for cohesiveness.
