The Perl Journal February 2003
No less than four Yet Another Perl Conferences have been scheduled for 2003, including YAPC::Israel (announced last month). New this year is a specifically Canadian YAPC, scheduled to take place at Carlton University in Ottawa from May 15-16. Registration costs are $75 Canadian (about $50 in U.S. dollars) or $45 Canadian for students. There will be two speaker tracks with about 12 total presentions and a free tutorial, as well as professional training opportunities. Submissions for presentations will be accepted until March 21. Preregistration is available online at http://www.yapc.ca/.
The larger YAPC::America::North will be held June 16-18 in Boca Raton, Florida. Preregistration began February 1st, and the call for participation is online at http://www.yapc.org/America/ cfp.shtml. Standard presentations will run 20 minutes, but lightning talks, long or extra-long talks, and half-day tutorials will also be considered. Conference fees are $85.
And yes, there's yet another Perl conference—YAPC::Europe, which will be held in Paris, from July 23-25, in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. The conference will cost 99 Euros, and preregistration will begin March 1. The call for participation is at http://www.yapc.org/Europe/2003/cfp.en.html.
ActiveState's PerlASPX project allows ASP.NET-compliant web pages and web services to be written in Perl. ASP.NET apps can use early binding, just-in-time compilation, native optimization, and caching services to improve performance, but Microsoft provides support for only C#, Visual Basic, and JScript.
While ActiveState's web site, at http://aspn.activestate.com/ ASPN/Downloads/PerlASPX, mentions only a beta version of the software (which expired in December), a more recent release candidate was actually announced in January—contact Support@ ActiveState.com to request a copy. The company expects to release the final version later this month. PerlASPX requires ActiveState's Perl Dev Kit and ActivePerl, as well as either the Microsoft .NET Framework Redistributable or the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK.
TinyPerl, a bare-bones, 616 KB version of Perl 5.8, is now available as a SourceForge project (http://tinyperl.sourceforge.net/). The project is described as "Perl on a floppy," and is designed to aid developers seeking to publish their Perl applications. The 2.0 release is able to generate Windows executables from .pl scripts (there is currently no Linux or Mac version of TinyPerl). Author Graciliano Monteiro Passos posted on Perl Monks that "This will be the last release [for] a long, long time! It's very stable, and with everything that I want for now."
The complete text of Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason by Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams (including corrections and example code, but so far excluding the index) has been posted to http://www.masonbook.com/. The authors say that the tool used to convert the book to HTML will also be published online. "Though," they add, "we of course encourage you to buy a copy."
Following the passing of Israel.pm member Arial Brosh, new maintainers are sought for his modules. Brosh's author directory on CPAN—http://search.cpan.org/author/SCHOP/—list fourteen modules, including code for whois queries and a project to bring Hebrew character support to Perl. Volunteers should contact Gabor Szabo at gabor@perl.org.il.
A memorial web site for Brosh is also under consideration.
Zach Lipton has installed LXR—"Linux Cross Reference," a source-code indexing tool originally developed for use on the Linux kernel—at http://tinderbox.perl.org/lxr/. Now the Parrot and Perl5 source code is searchable by filename or contents, and hyperlinks within the source files allow browsers to find all references to a function or subroutine. LXR can also diff two separate versions of a file. The source tree is updated every night.
Bug reports or feature requests should be sent to Lipton at zach@zachlipton.com. He did warn on the perl6-internals list that "occasionally, LXR will return a blank or near-blank page. If you hit this bug, hitting reload a couple of times should make the correct file show up."
A new mailing list has been set up on perl.org for users and developers of the Perl Archive Toolkit, and for discussion of general Perl packaging issues. App::Packer and Apache::PAR users are also encouraged to join. You can subscribe by sending mail to par-subscribe@perl.org, and the list archives are also posted at http:// archive.develooper.com/par@perl.org/.
Damian Conway wrote on the perl6-language list that "It's my understanding that TPF is not intending to offer Larry [Wall] (or Dan [Sugalski]) another grant for 2003," on the grounds that Perl 6 and Parrot should not eclipse other Perl projects. Discussion on this issue continues; the Perl Foundation is reportedly in the process of setting up an online questionnaire to solicit feedback about where advocacy efforts and grant money should be best applied.
We want your news! Send tips to editors@tpj.com.