October 2013 Archives

Writing Non-Blocking Applications with Mojolicious: Part 1

One question I often hear is “Why should I chose Mojolicious versus one of the other major Perl web frameworks?” While I have many answers to that question, I personally believe the most important difference is that Mojolicious is designed to be non-blocking. Many of you will have heard of Node.js. The reason that Node is popular is that it is designed to be non-blocking. By writing your webapp in a non-blocking style using a non-blocking framework, you can often build a faster and smarter application, requiring fewer servers to handle the same amount of traffic. Although Perl has several web frameworks, only one was written with non-blocking design in mind: Mojolicious.

To demonstrate a non-blocking application, I am going to write a simple pastebin using Mojolcious and Mango, a non-blocking MongoDB library (from the same developers as Mojo).

Some code ports to Mojolicious, just for fun.

Today is a relatively minor holiday in the US, but I had work off all the same. I found myself experimenting (when I probably should have been working on my YAPC::Brazil talk :-/). Thanks to today’s PerlWeekly (you are a subscriber right??), I found out about an interesting post by Johnny Moreno which creates a tiny json service backend using Perl. Of course it uses CGI.pm to do so, which made me curious what a Mojolcious port would look like.

PDL 2.007 Released!

PDL (“Perl Data Language”) gives standard Perl the ability to compactly store and speedily manipulate the large N-dimensional data arrays which are the bread and butter of scientific computing.

PDL turns Perl into a free, array-oriented, numerical language similar to (but, we believe, better than) such commercial packages as IDL and MatLab. One can write simple perl expressions to manipulate entire numerical arrays all at once. Simple interactive shells, pdl2 and perldl, are provided for use from the command line along with the PDL module for use in Perl scripts.

As a frequent PDL user and occasional contributor, I am happy to pass along this note from Chris Marshall and the whole PDL team. Read the entire release message here.


It is with great pleasure that the PDL development team announces the release of the latest version of the PDL Data Language with 64bit platform support.

This release would not have been possible without the contributions of developersChris Marshall, Craig DeForest, Derek Lamb, Dima Kogan, Rob/Sisyphus, David Mertens, Diab Jerius, William Parker, and Henning Glawe.

A special thanks also to those who helped with bug reports, problem discussions, and, of course, participation in CPAN Testers which has helped to make the best tested PDL release ever!

Enjoy and Happy PDL-ing! The PDL Development Team

About Joel Berger

user-pic As I delve into the deeper Perl magic I like to share what I can.