The Perl Journal April 2003
Larry Wall has published the Apocalypse on subroutines (http:// www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/03/07/apocalypse6.html). "It is radical, but you'll like it anyway (we hope)," he writes. "At least the old way of calling subroutines still works. Unlike regexes, Perl subroutines don't have a lot of historical cruft to get rid of. In fact, the basic problem with Perl 5's subroutines is that they're not crufty enough, so the cruft leaks out into user-defined code instead, by the Conservation of Cruft Principle. Perl 6 will let you migrate the cruft out of the user-defined code and back into the declarations where it belongs."
The latest Parrot release, codenamed "Juice" as a nod to the new -Oj optimization flag, is now available from CPAN (http:// www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SF/SFINK/parrot-0.0.10.tar.gz). The -Oj flag, which allows use of IMCC metadata for JIT optimization, is one aspect of Parrot's new IMCC integration. The IMCC features, along with a fast CGP (Computed Goto Prederefed) runloop for operations not handled by the JIT core, should lead to substantial improvements in speed. Among many other new features, Parrot has also gained eval instruction for opcodes; fixes for subroutines, coroutines, and continuations; more benchmarking; optimized math operations; and improvements to the native calling interface. Steve Fink also called attention to the "shiny new Basic compiler to go along with the earlier Basic interpreter."
The Barcelona Perl Mongers group, founded two years ago, has resumed regular meetings. The group has a mailing list (http:// barcelona.pm.org/) and is establishing a schedule for gatherings; meetings are to be held on the fourth Thursday of each month. "We welcome Perl Monger tourists!" the group posted to use.perl.org.
Globetrotting Perl aficionados can add Hamburg, Germany to their itinerary as well; the new Perl Mongers group there (http:// hamburg.pm.org/) meets on the second Wednesday of each month. And on April 8th, the Washington D.C. Perl Mongers group (http:// dc.pm.org/meeting.html) will throw open their doors to anyone interested in hearing Mark Jason Dominus describe "six useful Perl tools that you probably didn't know you needed."
As this year's YAPC::Europe conference in Paris draws near, organizers of the event are starting to think about next year's gathering. The Belfast group has already mentioned a willingness to host YAPC::Europe::2004; any other interested groups should send e-mail to committee@yapceurope.org. Venue requirements are described in the CPAN module YAPC::Venue or at http://www .yapc.org/venue-reqs.txt. Briefly, the conference site must offer several rooms of varying size for assemblies, meetings, storage, dining, and so forth; catering services for three days; network and a/v equipment; and access to an airport.
The "Perl bundle" in ActiveState's redesigned Programmer Network (ASPN) now includes access to O'Reilly's Safari line of online books. "Members can now bookmark and annotate this content, even cut-and-paste the code directly into their programs," ActiveState announced. An ASPN Perl membership goes for $495; the site is at http://www.activestate.com/ASPN/.
Tim Bunce announced three new DBI releases in quick succession, culminating in DBI 1.35. A few new methods have been implemented, including clone (to make a new connection to the database that is identical to a previous connection), can (to check if a given method is implemented by the driver or if a default method is provided by the DBI), and install_method ("so driver private methods can be 'installed' into the DBI dispatcher and no longer need to be called using $h->func(..., $method_name)"). Furthermore, Bunce warns that "Future versions of the DBI will not support Perl 5.6.0 or earlier: Perl 5.6.1 will be the minimum supported version." The full list of changes to the DBI module are listed at http://archive.develooper.com/dbi-announce@perl.org/ msg00149.html.
Simon Ilyushchenko and Adrian Arva are working on an open-source project to implement Macromedia's AMF protocol in Perl, allowing developers to create Flash movies that communicate with the server to get data and updates without relying on Macromedia's Flash Remoting server tool. "If you believe in the idea of more and more programmers taking a shot at developing clients in Flash, you must also see the need for a good data gateway between web clients (the Flash movie) and web servers. Macromedia offers just that in Macromedia Flash Remoting, available for ColdFusion, JRun, .NET, J2EE," they write. "We think that it is very important for the Open Source community to make this technology available in Perl and (why not?) in Python as well. We set out to decode the protocol, but soon discovered that PHP folks beat us by a month, so we simply rewrote their code in Perl." Flash Remoting in Perl (FLAP) is currently in a 0.02 release; contributions to the project are welcomed. The project's web site is at http:// simonf.com/flap/.
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