The Perl Journal June, 2004
Six Apart is sponsoring a developers' contest for its Perl-based Movable Type weblog publishing platform. Entries must consist of Movable Type plugins; a total of $20,000 in prizes will be distributed to six winners. The grand prize is the winner's choice of an Apple G5 or a Dell Pentium 4.
Submissions will be judged on four criteria: broad applicability, robustness, integration, and clean design. The judges are specifically looking for plugins that take advantage of the new, "developer friendly" architecture—including a new suite of APIs—in Movable Type 3.0. The deadline for entry is July 6; details are at http://www.movabletype.org/contest.shtml.
The Perl Quiz of the Week mailing list has recently been revived after a long hiatus. Since Mark Jason Dominus had become too overwhelmed with other work to generate quizzes and summaries every week, the list now works via a community format; the quizzes and summaries are created by volunteer guest editors, and Mark Jason Dominus acts as the list administrator. The difficulty level of the quizzes varies between "regular" and "expert." Archives and subscription links to the Quiz of the Week mailing list are at http://perl.plover.com/~alias/list.cgi/0/; an associated discussion list is archived at http://perl.plover.com/ ~alias/list.cgi/1/.
YAPC, an offshoot of the Perl Foundation, has formed a new committee dedicated to encouraging YAPC conferences in Europe. "The aim is to provide a focal point, organize online registration, mailing lists, technical and conference advice and to generally support activities encouraging Perl Conferences and Workshops in Europe," the YAPC::Europe committee announced. Norbert Gruener, Ann Barcomb, Philippe Bruhat, David Lacravate, Nicholas Clark, and Richard Foley currently sit on the committee; ad-hoc members are expected to be added in the future. The YAPC::Europe web site is http://www.yapceurope.org/.
In other conference news, the Open Source Developers Conference (organized by the by the Melbourne Perl Mongers) has also issued a call for papers. Lightning talks, standard 20-minute presentations, and long (45-minute) talks will be scheduled; topics may cover business issues, implementation guides, or design aspects of open-source technologies. Deadline for proposals is June 28th. The conference will be held December 1-3 at Monash University in Melbourne. You can submit proposals at http://www .osdc.com.au/papers/call_for_papers.html.
Finally, registration is open for the sixth German Perl Workshop 2004, which will be held June 29-July 1 at the Barbara-Künkelin-Halle Schorndorf, near Stuttgart. "In contrast to the international Perl Conferences that keep growing," organizers write, "we want to retain the workshop atmosphere as much as possible. Therefore, we stay with one track only and restrict attendance to approximately 200 participants." Attendance fees are 75 Euros, with discounts for students and speakers.
Dan Sugalski has started a new documentation effort for the Parrot project, saying "I'll try and make sure [questions] get answered, and if some kind volunteer (hint, hint...:) would like to both take questions that hit the list and add them here, as well as taking the answers as they get put up and repost 'em to the list, well...that'd be swell."
The new wiki is at http://www.vendian.org/parrot/wiki/bin/ view.cgi/Main/HowDoIDo. It notes: "Any questions on the usage of Parrot are fair game here, from the trivial to the deep C-level stuff." So far, the questions include "How do I handle lexical variables in PIR?" and "How do I call a function in PIR?"
LuckaSoft has released the EngInSite Perl Editor, a Windows-based IDE specifically designed for creating, testing, and debugging Perl scripts. The "lite" version is free (though not open source). The "professional" version, which costs $49.00, adds a regex tester, a POD viewer, an integrated FTP server and a light web server, and technical support. You can find out more at http://enginsite .com/Perl.htm.