The State of the Onion 9
In Larry Wall's ninth annual State of the Onion address, he explains Perl 6's Five Year Plan, how Perl programmers are like spies (or vice versa), and how open source can learn from the intelligence community.
[Perl.com]
Perl 5 Summary for 3-9 October 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 3-9 October 2005
[Perl5 List Summaries]
Perl Internationalization and Haskell: An Interview with Autrijus Tang
Edd Dumbill interviews Perl and Pugs hacker Autrijus Tang about internationalization, localization, and why he started writing an implementation of Perl 6 in Haskell. Autrijus is a featured speaker at the upcoming EuroOSCON.
[Perl.com]
Perl 6 Summary for October 02, 2005
Matt Fowles has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists.
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 26 September-2 October 2005
Perl 5 Summary for 26 September-2 October 2005
[Perl 5 List Summaries]
Perl Needs Better Tools
Perl is a fantastic language for getting your work done. It's flexible, forgiving, malleable, and dynamic. Why shouldn't it have good, powerful tools? Are Perl development tools behind those of other, perhaps less-capable languages? J. Matisse Enzer argues that Perl needs better tools, and explains what those tools should do.
[Perl.com]
Perl 6 Summary for September 25, 2005
Piers Cawley has the latest on Perl 6 development, with p6i wrangling bugs and loading libraries, p6l stringifying, numifiying, and booleanifying everything in sight, and Luke Palmer summarizing cabal meetings.
[Perl 6 Summaries]
Perl 5 Summary for 19-25 September 2005
Perl 5 Porters Summary for 19-25 September 2005
[Perl5 List Summaries]
 Special: Open Source Programming Certificate Series --
With beginning to intermediate courses in Perl, Java, PHP, mySQL, and the Linux/Unix file system, our Open Source Programming Certificate Series is designed to give you a breath of real-world experience. Upon completion of the series, you'll receive a Certificate of Professional Development from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education, a plus for any resume. Enroll in all five courses and receive a $300 instant rebate. Offer expires November 30th.
Perl 6 Summary for September 11, 2005
Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 lists, with the Perl 6 and Parrot and Pirate results from Google's Summer of Code sponsorships bringing good news to waiting porters.
[Perl 6 Summaries]
This Week in Perl 6, August 17-23, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i seeing the most HLL discussion yet; p6l debating binding, parameters, and primitives; and p6c appreciating pretty graphics.
[Perl.com]
Using Qpsmtpd
While email is increasingly a worker's most important communication medium, the onslaught of attacks from spam, viruses, and other malicious email content is ever increasing. By implementing a mail server in Perl, you can use your favorite language to mitigate those attacks and provide greater flexibility in processing incoming mail. Matt Sergeant shows how to install, configure, and write plugins for Qpsmtpd.
[Sysadmin]
Parsing iCal Data
Perl's suitability as a glue language allows you to connect two applications that wouldn't normally communicate by translating their data files between formats. It's especially nice when these are open file formats. Robert Pratte shows how to parse iCal data files--as used in Apple's iCalendar program--and visualize them using the open source Dot graphic package.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, Through August 14, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with containers and metamodels on the Perl 6 compiler list, metamodel and trait questions on the Perl 6 language list, and opcode changes and test modules on the Perl 6 internals list.
[Perl.com]
Automated GUI Testing
Automation is the friend of testing. If you can drive your program with a script, you can test it. How does that work with GUIs, though? In the Windows world, one solution is the Win32::GuiTest module. George Nistorica demonstrates how to use it.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, August 2-9, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i seeing build and platform patches, p6l exploring meta-meta discussions, and p6c enjoying Pugs and PxPerl releases.
[Perl.com]
Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 4
The ultimate goal of all programming is to be as unproductive as possible--to write games. In part four of a series on building a 3D engine with Perl, Geoff Broadwell explains how to profile your engine, how to improve performance and code with display lists, and how to render text.
[Perl.com]
Important Notice for Perl.com Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds
O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, through August 2, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with PIL discussion on the Perl 6 compiler list, type and container questions on the Perl 6 language list, and a Lua compiler on the Perl 6 internals list.
[Perl.com]
Using Perl to Manage Plist Files, Part 2
Part 2 goes into much more detail on managing Plist files. You'll change some values and save the altered Plist file back to disk. Then you'll loop over entries in a Plist file, get a dump of the NetInfo database, and print all the users in the database using Perl foreach loops. To do that you'll convert the Cocoa dictionaries and arrays to Perl hashes and arrays. Finally, you'll create a Plist file from scratch, build the sample Xgrid cal job listed in the Xgrid man page by creating the structure using Perl hashes and arrays, and then convert them to Cocoa equivalents.
[MacDevCenter.com]
Porting Test::Builder to Perl 6
With Pugs and Parrot playing nicely and bringing Perl 6 to the rest of us, enterprising early adopters are experimenting with porting their popular Perl 5 modules to Perl 6. O'Reilly editor chromatic recently pushed the limits of Pugs by porting Test::Builder to Perl 6. Here's what he learned about Perl 6, Pugs, and his design along the way.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, July 20-26, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6i discussing garbage collection schemes, p6l rethinking object attribute access and plotting GC APIs and access, and p6c reporting problems, documenting PIL, and discussing the grammar.
[Perl.com]
Using Perl to Manage Plist Files
A common question is how to manage complex Plist files with scripts. The defaults command, which is often used to manage simple values in Plist files, does not easily manage the nested arrays or dictionaries that are present in most Plist files. In this first article of a two-part series, James Reynolds pulls together a little Perl and Cocoa to solve this problem.
[MacDevCenter.com]
An Introduction to Test::MockDBI
It is a sweet and fitting thing to test your code, but if you're working with non-Perl, you'll likely run into difficult situations. For example, how do you force a database connection failure to test that you can recover? Mark Leighton Fisher has an answer: mock up the database. He explains the design, goals, and use of Test::MockDBI.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, July 13-19, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with Pugs running on a JavaScript engine, GMC plans for Parrot, and typechecking and metamodel discussions about Perl 6.
[Perl.com]
Ten Essential Development Practices
Perl lets you be productive in everything from quick and dirty throwaway programs to big, business-critical applications. Building the latter requires some discipline, though. Damian Conway shares ten essential development practices to make your Perl programming easier, more reliable, and even more enjoyable.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, July 5-12, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists, with p6l discussing metamodels, MMD, and invocants; p6i handling Leo's new calling conventions; and p6c plotting on retargeting Pugs to different back ends.
[Perl.com]
Building Navigation Menus
Well-designed websites are easy to navigate, with sensible menus, breadcrumb trails, and the information you need within three clicks of where you are. Rather than tediously coding navigation structures by hand, why not consider using a Perl module to generate them for you? Shlomi Fish shows how to use his HTML::Widgets::NavMenu module.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, June 29-July 5, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with YAPC::NA hackathons, a request for better archives, DBI v2 plans from Tim Bunce, and PGE interoperability questions.
[Perl.com]
Annotating CPAN
Perl has voluminous documentation, both in the core distribution and in thousands of CPAN modules. That doesn't make it all perfect, though, and the amount of documentation can make it daunting to find and recommend changes or clarifications. The Perl Foundation recently sponsored Ivan Tubert-Brohman to fix this; here's how he built AnnoCPAN, an annotation service for module documentation.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, June 21-28, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with p6c discussing self-hosting options for Perl 6, Parrot segfaults and changes; and AUTOLOAD and self method invocation discussions continuing on p6l.
[Perl.com]
Data Munging with Sprog
Sprog is a graphical programming environment written in Perl, programmable by connecting components visually and setting their properties. Sure, you've heard that promise before--but Grant McLean demonstrates how to retrieve and munge tabular data from a web page into LDIF files without writing a lick of code.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, June 8-21, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with the Austrian Perl Hackathon, rejiggered registers, frames, and calling conventions in Parrot, and lots of bikeshed painting in Perl 6 language.
[Perl.com]
Understanding and Using Iterators
Unlike some other programming languages, Perl makes it easy to process lists of items. Lists and arrays aren't always suitable for every task, though; sometimes you need something more powerful. Sometimes you need an iterator. Joshua Gatcomb explains where iterators are useful and how to use them.
[Perl.com]
Independently Parsing Perl
Stodgy, boring languages have great editors. What's keeping Perl from refactoring support, perfect syntax highlighting, and other advanced transformation techniques? It's really difficult to parse Perl. Fortunately, Adam Kennedy's PPI project provides a standalone Perl parser that operates correctly on all but 28 of the 38,000 CPAN modules. Here's how it works and what you can do with it.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, June 1-7, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with Parrot 0.2.1 released, mod_parrot bundled with mod_pugs (or vice versa), an end to the reduce operator debate, and a paean to Parrot lead architect Dan Sugalski.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, May 25, 2005-May 31, 2005
Matt Fowles summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with Parrot keys, MMD, Tcl, Python discussion, Pugs' continued evolution, introspection, generation, and more Perl 6 meta-programming goodness.
[Perl.com]
Catalyst
MVC frameworks are hot again in the web development world. Perl has a rich array of choices. One new contender is Catalyst, an elegant platform for database-backed applications. Developers Jesse Sheidlower and Sebastian Riedel explain the design goals and build an Ajax-powered wiki in 30 lines of code.
[Perl.com]
This Week in Perl 6, May 18 - 24, 2005
Piers Cawley summarizes the Perl 6 mailing lists with Inline::Pugs bridging the gap, ParTcl coming into existence, and many questions about multimethod dispatch in Perl 6.
[Perl.com]
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