The Perl Journal March 2003
The seventh annual Perl Conference will, as in past years, be held in conjunction with the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). The event, which also includes the Python 11 Conference and the third PHP Conference, will be held on July 7-11 in Portland, Oregon.
Ideas for lightning talks—five minute presentations that focus narrowly on one facet of an idea, or on a single example or technique—are now being solicited. "The point is that because the talk is only five minutes long, you don't have to take it so seriously," writes Mark Jason Dominus. "Just try to say something brief and interesting, and then get out in a hurry."
If you'd like to give a Perl-oriented lightning talk at OSCON, e-mail a four-sentence abstract of your talk to osc-lt-2003-perl@ plover.com. Submissions will be accepted until June 7th.
The OSCON website is at http://conferences.oreillynet .com/os2003/, and more details about the lightning talks are online at http://perl.plover.com/lt/osc2003/. Questions about the Perl talks in particular should go to mjd-osc-lt-2003-perl@plover.com.
With ninja-like speed and mystery, the influence of the far-flung and powerful Perl Mongers organization continues to spread. The cities of Stockholm, Sweden, and Buffalo, New York, have now sprouted user groups, which will undoubtedly spread the knowledge of advanced scripting techniques among the native populaces.
The Buffalo Perl Mongers have gone so far as to create a web site, located at http://buffalo.pm.org/, and to advertise their mailing list and gatherings. The activities of the Stockholm Perl Mongers, meanwhile, can be traced to http://stockholm.pm.org/meetings.html. Sources report that this users group is working in close association with other Perl Mongers to organize a grand cabal—the Scandinavian Perl Workshop (http://perlworkshop.dk/)—which will meet April 25-26 in Copenhagen.
Ten dollars and a round of beer is riding on the question: Will Parrot or Python be faster at executing a pure Python benchmark? Dan Sugalski and Guido van Rossum are squaring off over the challenge, which was announced on the perl6-internals list. The details of the competition are to be determined at OSCON 2003, and the results announced at OSCON 2004. Sugalski has also raised the ugly specter of a "mudwrestling cage deathmatch," though both participants hope to avoid such a tragic eventuality.
In a separate thread, the POE framework for creating multitasking applications in Perl (in development since 1998) has announced its 0.25 release. POE divides execution time among sessions, which cooperate to perform multiple tasks. POE also has a component architecture, supported by medium- and low-level concurrency functions; components have been written to handle client, server, and peer networking functions, as well as other tasks. Graphical toolkits (Tk and GTK) are supported, as well as Curses, HTTP, and other user interfaces—or even several interfaces at once.
New features in the 0.25 release include support for ActivePerl 5.8.0 and Gentoo Linux; TCP client and server support for multiple session types; better TCP server handling of aborted connections; more configuration options for TCP clients and servers; and bug fixes. More information is available from http://poe.perl.org/.
A new SourceForge project is aiming to bring "a dash of Perlishness into Java" by implementing Perl idioms in Java. foreach, grep, join, map, pop, push, shift, split, and unshift have been implemented, along with "a (very) rudimentary form of autovivication," and "a class representing Perl's notion of truth." (Project admin David Jantzen wrote on the Perl Monks site: "If only I could convey my glee at the realization that a java.lang.Boolean initialized to 'false' is true according to Perl's semantics!")
The project has yet to formally release any files, but the source code is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/perlforjava/.
Aaron Straup Cope has updated his Net::Google module, which provides an interface to the Google SOAP API. The Google methods can be used to get spelling suggestions, find cached documents, and, of course, get search results. On top of this, Darren Chamberlain has added a new module, DBD::google, which allows Perl authors to treat Google as a data source for DBI queries.
"For the most part," Chamberlain writes, "use DBD::google like you use any other DBD, except instead of going through the trouble of building and installing (or buying!) database software, and employing a DBA to manage your data, you can take advantage of Google's ability to do this for you. Think of it as outsourcing your DBA, if you like."
Both modules are available on CPAN.
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