Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Interview with Bill Odom, President of TPF

Bill Odom, President of The Perl Foundation, sat down with me at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop to talk a little about The Perl Foundation and how it is helping to support Perl and the Perl community. In the interview Bill talks about a wide range of topics including how he sees TPF helping drive the continued success and adoption of Perl as a programming language for years to come.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Perl Hacks Winners

Congratulations to all of the winners of our "Perl Hacks" book give-away and thanks to O'Reilly for providing and shipping the books for the giveaway. We had five winners from around the globe... Todd C. from Michigan, Timothy P. from Wisconsin, Vincent F. from Canada, Arjen L. from The Netherlands, and Ian B. from the UK.

Check back soon for more contests and book giveaways at Perlcast.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Ask The Expert

Perlcast is considering adding an "Ask The Expert" segment to the lineup. If you have a question about Perl, email it to perlcast+expert@gmail.com and ask the expert, Randal Schwartz.

Perl News 2006-10-12

Users Groups, Conferences, and Workshops



Announcing the 9th German Perl Workshop



The 9th German Perl-Workshop will take place from Wednesday, 21 Feb. 2007 to Friday, 23 Feb.2007 and you are invited to submit proposals for talks or tutorials. We will happily accept proposals for interesting talks related to Perl.

Dates Set for YAPC::NA 2007



The dates for YAPC::NA 2007 have finally been established! The Houston.pm group and YAPC::NA 2007 organizers are pleased to announce that next year's YAPC::NA will be Monday, June 25th through Wednesday, June 27th, at the University of Houston. You can also visit the YAPC::NA homepage at www.yapc.org—America for updates and information.

New Users Group



The Vlaanderen.pm group was formed last month and are beginning to organize at vlaanderen.pm.org .

Perl In Print



State of The Onion 10



Larry Wall's State of the Onion 10 is now online on Perl.com. This talk was presented at OSCON 2006.

Perl Review Fall 2006



The Fall 2006 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have alread received an email telling them all about it. You can even buy TPR on the newsstand now if you shop at Powell's Technical Books in Portland.

In this issue (besides the cover showing the Larry Wall action figure by ArtCard Mike):

  • Google's Summer of Code -- Jim Brandt
  • pmtools -- Mark Leighton Fisher
  • Parrot Magic Cookies -- Jonathan Scott Duff
  • Agent-based Programming in Perl -- Guinevere Nell
  • ETL Nightmares -- Thomas MacKenzie
  • and more!


Google Code Search



Google has released a code search at www.google.com—codesearch
. The code search will allow you to search the source of publicly available code. Strangely, it seems that only a portion of CPAN is actually indexed though.

Modules of Interest



Possibly Yet Another Web Framework



Bigtop 0.18 has been released along with some movies demonstrating its capabilities. Bigtop is a language for describing the data of a web application. Usually this data will be stored in a relational database. Once you have a description of your data, you can generate a web application from it. This includes all the pieces you need like: the sql statements ready for feeding to your database command line tool, the httpd.conf you need to Include in the httpd.conf on your system, the modules that will handle the web requests, the models that make the database tables look like classes, etc. Search for BigTop on CPAN to find out more.

Parting Words



The Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006. Nick was once the Pumpking for Perl 5 and is also a key contributor to the Tk and Encode modules. For more information, please see the Perl Foundation Blog entry at news.perlfoundation.org.