Jeff Thalhammer's Perl::Critic Update

Jeff Thalhammer spent some time talking to Perlcast about what's new in the world of Perl::Critic. I hope that you enjoy the show.

Michel Rodriguez on XML::Twig

Back at OSCON 2008, Michel Rodriguez, the creator and maintainer of XML::Twig sat down with me and talked a little about this powerful XML toolkit for Perl.

Fear and Loathing in Perl

Hello and welcome back to Perlcast. After a long break, we are back and are cleaning out the archives and publishing some shows that should have been released long ago. To kick things off, we have brian d foy talking about "Fear and Loathing in Perl" where he takes us through a humorous journey though a day, one where you just can't say no.

Jeff Horwitz on mod_parrot

Wow, six months really? Okay, so maybe not that long, but Perlcast has definitely been podfading and that's just not acceptable. Let's start to fix that with an interview with Jeff Horwitz about mod_parrot, the last Apache module you'll ever need. Enjoy!

Making My Own CPAN

brian d foy presents on Making My Own CPAN.

Nordic Perl Workshop Update

I've been in Copenhagen for the past four days because of the Nordic Perl Workshop. Thanks to Stonehenge for getting me there!

At the workshop I had the opportunity to talk to many great Perl hackers who you will here from over the next few weeks. To get it started, here's a lightning talk from brian d foy about benchmarking Perl.

Reverse Interview: Josh on YAPC::NA 2006

A co-worker of mine, Jason Gessner, interviewed me about my experiences in co-hosting YAPC::NA 2006.

• Interview Audio


• YAPC::NA 2007
  

Jeffrey Thalhammer on Perl Critic

Perlcast is back with an interview with Jeffrey Thalhammer, the creator and maintainer of Perl Critic, a static source code analyzer for Perl written in Perl. In the interview Jeffrey talks about what Perl Critic is, why he created it, and where he sees the system going.

• Interview Audio


• PerlCritic.com


• Perl Critic on CPAN

Tim Bunce on DBI

Welcome back to Perlcast! We have a great round of shows lined up for the new year starting with none other than Tim Bunce talking about the future of the Perl DBI. Based on the interview, it looks like we'll need to take the word 'Perl' out from in front of DBI because it looks like Tim has big plans for the future of the distribution.

• Interview Audio

Jerrad Pierce on the Perl Advent Calendar

Jerrad Pierce pointed out the Perl Advent Calendar to me today, so I called him up to talk a little about what the calendar is and what we can expect. The first item is already up for everyone to enjoy. Also, don't miss out on the Catalyst Advent Calendar over at catalystframework.org.

• Interview Audio


• The Perl Advent Calendar


• Catalyst Advent Calendar

Chip Salzenberg, The Parrot Pump King

Just off the heels of the Chicago Perl Hack-A-Thon, which focused very much on Parrot, I have a great interview with Chip Salzenberg. Chip is a past Perl 5 Pump King and is the current Parrot Pump King.

Parrot, as many of you know, is a virtual machine that is intended be a platform for running Perl 6. Actually, the Parrot virtual machine hopes to run many languages other than Perl 6. There is currently beginning implementations of many languages on Parrot including Ruby and TCL. Parrot is different than many other virtual machines that we know of. It is register-based, as opposed to the common stack-based architectures, and it is designed to run dynamic languages.

Listen to hear what Chip has to say about the state of Parrot and what you can do to help out.

• Interview Audio


• Parrot


• Perl Hack-a-thons

Kirsten Jones on the Socialtext Wiki

Kirsten Jones of Socialtext talked with us here at Perlcast about the REST API beta available now on thier wiki. Socialtext is a company based around a powerful wiki written largely in Perl. The wiki was recently open sourced and is available for download at SourceForge.

• Interview Audio


• Socialtext OPEN on Sourceforge


• Invitation to REST Beta

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.

Perl News 2006-09-19

Randal Schwartz, the roving Perl News reporter is back with a summary of what is new in the world of Perl as of September 19th, 2006.

• Perl News Audio

Conferences, Workshops and User Groups

YAPC NA and EU 2007 Locations Announced

Congratulations to Houston, Texas and Vienna, Austria who have just been announced as the venues for YAPC::NA and YAPC::EU in 2007. Both winning groups faced stiff competition from the likes of Boston, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lyon, France, and Pisa, Italy.

It's really exciting to see so much competition for YAPC venues. Runners-up need not get discouraged, you already have your proposal for next year!

Pittsburgh Perl Workshop

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is quickly approaching. The one-day workshop deemed "Perl at Work" is Saturday September 23rd at Carnage Mellon University in Pittsburgh, P. Register today at pghpw.org. Also when tagging blogs, photos, and other media related to the conference please use the tag "PPW06". And finally, be sure to visit wiki.pghpw.org to keep up with conference happenings and to sign up for post-conference social events.

First Firenze.pm Technical meeting

Firenze Perl Mongers are having a technical meeting on Thursday September 28th. The meeting will be hosted by Dada Spa in Firenze, Italy. Talks include and IPW2006 debriefing, Perl::Tags, and Test-driven programming. If you'll be in the Firenze area on the 28th consider giving a talk or at least stopping by to make the a great initial meeting. More information can be found at firenze.pm.org
.

The Dutch Perl Workshop 2007

There are rumblings of the organization of a Dutch Perl Workshop in February or March 2007. Please let the organizers know if you'd like to participate in the workshop, especially if you'd be willing to speak. The website for the 2006 Dutch Perl Workshop is workshop.perlpromo.nl.

CPAN

CPAN::Forum RSS Feeds for PAUSEID

CPAN::Forum has been recently updated. The change that might be the most important, especially for module authors, is that from now anyone can subscribe to e-mail alerts or RSS feeds based on PAUSEID. That includes that author's future modules as well.

If you are wondering what CPAN::Forum is, it is a web forum for discussing Perl's CPAN modules, asking questions, making comments, and helping other users with issues specific to a module. Check out www.cpanforum.com for more information.

CPAN.pm adds support for CPAN::Reporter

As of version 1.87_57, CPAN.pm has support for CPAN::Reporter. CPAN::Reporter is an add-on for the CPAN.pm module that uses Test::Reporter to send the results of module tests to the CPAN Testers project. Consult the CPAN::Reporter POD for details on installation and usage.

cpan6 - moving forward

Mark Overmeer gave a talk at YAPC::Europe 2006 about cpan6. The talk was generally well received has encouraged opening up the debate on CPAN for Perl6 to a wider audience and the beginnings of implementation.

The Perl community is invited to join either the pause6 mailing list for infrastructure discussions and/or the cpan6 tools list for client-side installers and upload tools.

• lists.cpan6.org—pause6
  
• lists.cpan6.org—tools
  

AxKit2 v1.1 Release

The AxKit development team announced AxKit2 version 1.1. AxKit2 is the second generation XML Application Server. AxKit makes content generation easy by providing powerful tools to push XML through stylesheets. This helps ensure your web applications don't suffer from XSS bugs, and provides standardized templating tools so that your template authors don't need to learn new Perl templating tools.

Interfacing with USPS

Business-USPS-WebTools is a new distribution on CPAN that allows you to interact with the US Postal Service's Web Tools. The distribution interfaces with the web services officially offered by the USPS. The current services available include the Address Information services: Address Standardization, Zip Code Lookup, and City/State Lookup. The only catch is that you'll need an account with USPS to actually use the service. Details can be found in the Business-USPS-WebTools POD.

Core Perl

News from P5P

Perl 5.9.4 is out in the wild. It includes quite a few changes, some of which are incompatible with previous versions of Perl. These changes include:

• A bareword argument to chdir() is now recognized as a file handle. Earlier releases interpreted the bareword as a directory name.
  
• An old feature of perl is that before "require" or "use" look for a file with a .pm extension, they will first look for a similar filename with a .pmc extension. If this file isfound, it will be loaded in place of any potentially existing file ending in a .pm extension. Previously, .pmc files were loaded only if more recent than the matching .pm file. Starting with 5.9.4, they'll be always loaded if they exist.
  
• The special arrays "@-" and "@+" are no longer interpolated in regular expressions.
  
• If you call a subroutine by a tainted name, and if it defers to an AUTOLOAD function, then $AUTOLOAD will be (correctly) tainted.
  

Also, there where four modules added to core:

• Module::Build
  
• Module::Load
  
• Hash::Util::FieldHash
  
• Win32API::File
  

Books

"Minimal Perl" book has been released

Tim Maher's book entitled "Minimal Perl: for UNIX and Linux People" has just been released from Manning. Its mission is to show readers "How to do the most with the least" while using Perl in UNIX/Linux (and related) environments. For additional details, see MinimalPerl.com and manning.com.

Practices of an Agile Developer

After quite a break for YAPC, house guests, and getting a new place, Perlcast is back with another great interview. This interview is with Andy Hunt of the The Pragmatic Programmers. In the interview Andy discusses some topics covered in the book "Practices of an Agile Developer".

• Interview Audio


• The Pragmatic Programmers

Interview with Tom Limoncelli

Recently, I interviewed Tom Limoncelli about a new book that he has written called "Time Management for System Administrators". You might remember Tom from an earlier title, "The Practice of System and Network Administration".

The new book, focuses specifically on how system administrators can better manage what they do and what is expected of them so as to get more done, meet expectations, and reclaim the 40 (or at least 50) hour work week. Tom provides tips that can be used by anyone in the technical field, but as a long time system administrator himself, he tuned this book for the needs of our ever so helpful cohorts who keep our systems alive.

Tom also wanted me to mention that he recently started working at Google and that they are hiring... from what I hear, free soda!

• Interview Audio


• Time Management for System Administrators


• Everything Sysadmin


• Tom's O'Reilly Blog


• Datebook 5


• Life Balance


• Google Jobs or Email Tom

Interview with Chris Pine

Well, I'm straying a little away from the world of Perl this week and releasing an interview with Chris Pine about his new book, "Learn to Program". This book is part of the Pragmatic Programmers "Facets of Ruby" series of books. Though it is not about Perl, it is interesting to hear Chris' reasons for using Ruby as a teaching language.

• Interview Audio


• Learn to Program


• Saving One: Sorry

Interview with Chad Fowler

Well, it has been a long time coming, but Perlcast finally has a new interview out. The interview is with Chad Fowler about his latest book "My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job". In the interview we talk about his experiences working with outsourcing operations in India, as well as, other countries. Chad discusses ways that programmers in any country can keep their edge and their job.

As an added bonus, The Pragmatic Bookshelf will be giving away some promotional copies of "My Job Went To India". To enter the drawing, just send an email to perlcast-at-gmail-dot-com before February 11th 2006 letting me know that you want to be entered.

• Interview Audio


• Chad's Website


• Pragmatic Bookshelf


• The Picture Show: Majestic