Perl.com Newsletter:The C

Perl.com Newsletter:The C
Perl.com update
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The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

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The Where 2.0 Conference
June 29-30, 2005 - Westin St. Francis, San Francisco, CA

Register by May 31, 2005 and save $400

O'Reilly Media, Inc. has launched Where 2.0, a forum for surveying the
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Good time-of-day, everyone. You're reading the Perl.com newsletter, which
summarizes the goings-on of the Perl world every couple of weeks. Here
are the highlights of the fortnight.

* Perl News in Brief

The Perl Foundation has released a set of recommended projects for
interested participants in Google's Summer of Code project. The deadline
for applications is June 14, so pick a project from the list (or invent
your own) and apply!

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1552221&tid=37&tid=42

Nicholas Clark, Perl 5.8.x pumpking, released Perl 5.8.7, hopefully the
most boring Perl release ever:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/04/1711216&tid=6&tid=16

ActiveState announced the simultaneous release of ActivePerl,
ActivePython, and ActiveTcl for Mac OS X 10.4:

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/07/1753217&tid=22&tid=3&tid=21&tid=6&tid=27&tid=42

Autrijus Tang released Pugs 6.2.6:

http://search.cpan.org/~autrijus/Perl6-Pugs-6.2.6/

(In other news, GHC 6.4 actually builds and works on Linux PPC, at least
with some patches. What a relief!)

* Perl.com Articles

Web development frameworks are heating up again, with good
object-relational mappers and persistence schemes making it easier to
write decent MVC code. Until Perl 6 offers serializable continuations,
making a Seaside-killer easy to write, the current cool thing is Ruby on
Rails. If you really can't give Ruby a try (and you should, at least in
your experimenting time), Catalyst offers a lot of flexibility and power
for Perl programmers. With inspiration from Perl's Maypole, Ruby's Rails,
and Java's Struts, you can write a lot of application with a little code.
OED editor Jesse Sheidlower introduces Catalyst and demonstrates a
working, Ajax-enhanced wiki written with 30 lines of code:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/02/catalyst.html

A heated debate is occurring right now on the Extreme Perl mailing list
about the need for better tools for Perl development. (Don't worry;
there's an upcoming article about that too.) In particular, one useful
feature of decent IDEs is automated refactoring. Sometimes it seems that
parsing Perl is too difficult to make this practical, but then Adam
Kennedy goes and does something like releasing a new version of PPI and
proves everyone somewhat wrong. "Independently Parsing Perl" shows how to
use PPI to analyze and modify Perl source code without actually running
it. Extract Method here we come:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/09/ppi.html

* Tiny Little Blurbs of Thought

Michael Schwern, Perl roustabout (see the "circus" definition) and
ExtUtils::MakeMaker (now you get it), recently explained why Module::Build
won't support PREFIX, and why MakeMaker never should have, and what they
will soon both support instead:

http://mungus.schwern.org/~schwern/talks/PREFIX/slides/slide001.html

Are you thinking of going to YAPC::NA? By the time the next Perl.com
newsletter comes out, you'd better be packing, lest it be too late.

Oh, and one more thing--remember the other new Perl books alluded to a few
newsletters ago? The O'Reilly New and Upcoming Book List has revealed a
couple of secrets:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/new.html


Hey I know that guy,
- c
chromatic@oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera

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MAKE Magazine "It's not yuppie bullshit"

If you haven't checked out O'Reilly's latest runaway success, MAKE
Magazine, shame on you! Seriously, you might want to read Elizabeth
Spiers's article "Wired, MAKE and MacGyver, the evolution of the geek mag"
<http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a4255.asp>. And if you're still
on the fence, check out the very latest Volume-2 on:
http://www.makezine.com

Subscribe at:
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*** Featured Articles ***

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.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/09/ppi.html

***

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.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/p6pdigest/20050608.html

***

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.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/02/catalyst.html

***

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.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/p6pdigest/20050602.html

***

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.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/05/p6pdigest/20050526.html

***

Manipulating Word Documents with Perl
Unix hackers love their text editors for plain-text manipulatey
goodness--especially Emacs and Vim with their wonderful extension
languages (and sometimes Perl bindings). Don't fret, defenestrators-to-be.
Andrew Savikas demonstrates how to use Perl for your string-wrangling when
you have to suffer through using Word.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/05/26/word_control.html

***

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