Application Design with POE
Day in and day out, I write large applications in perl. I’m cursed I tell you. While large scale, long-running applications in pure perl may sound fairly easy to write, they are not. Perl, beyond a certain size and…
Profiling Perl
Update: Perl Profiling has evolved since this article was written, please see http://www.perl.org/about/whitepapers/perl-profiling.html for the latest information. Everyone wants their Perl code to run faster. Unfortunately, without understanding why the code is taking so long to start with, it’s impossible…
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Bringing Java into Perl
In this article, I will show how to bring Java code into a Perl program with Inline::Java. I won’t probe the internals of Inline or Inline::Java, but I will tell you what you need to make a Java class available…
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A Refactoring Example
About a year ago, a person asked the Fun With Perl mailing list about some code they had written to do database queries. It’s important to note that this person was posting from an .it address; why will become…
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Cooking with Perl, Part 3
Editor’s note: In this third and final batch of recipes excerpted from Perl Cookbook, you’ll find solutions and code examples for extracting HTML table data, templating with HTML::Mason, and making simple changes to elements or text. Sample Recipe: Extracting…
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Cooking with Perl, Part 2
Editor’s note: The new edition of Perl Cookbook has released, so this week we continue to highlight recipes-new to the second edition-for your sampling pleasure. This week’s excerpts include recipes from Chapter 14 (“Database Access”) and Chapter 18 (“Internet…
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Cooking with Perl
Editor’s note: The new edition of Perl Cookbook is about to hit store shelves, so to trumpet its release, we offer some recipes-new to the second edition-for your sampling pleasure. This week’s excerpts include recipes from Chapter 6 (“Pattern…
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Perl Design Patterns, Part 3
This is the third (and final) article in a series which form one Perl programmer’s response to the book Design Patterns (also known as the Gang of Four book or simply as GoF, because four authors wrote it). As…
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Perl Design Patterns, Part 2
This is the second in a series of articles which form one Perl programmer’s response to the book, Design Patterns (also known as the Gang of Four book or simply as GoF, because four authors wrote it). As I…
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Overloading
Introduction: What is Overloading? All object-oriented programming languages have a feature called overloading, but in most of them this term means something different from what it means in Perl. Take a look at this Java example: public Fraction(int num,…
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Perl Design Patterns
Introduction In 1995, Design Patterns was published, and during the intervening years, it has had a great influence on how many developers write software. In this series of articles, I present my take on how the Design Patterns book…
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For Perl Programmers : only
Have you ever wished that you could have more than one version of a Perl module installed on your system, and that you could easily tell Perl exactly which one you wanted to load? Perhaps you have some legacy…
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Object Oriented Exception Handling in Perl
The main goal of this article is to discuss in detail about exception handling in Perl and how to implement it using Error.pm. On our way, we’ll be touching upon the advantages of using exception-handling over traditional error-handling mechanisms,…
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The Phrasebook Design Pattern
Have you ever written a Perl application that connects to a database? If so, then you probably faced a problem of having some code like: $statement = q(select isbn from book where title = ‘Design Patterns’); $sth = $dbh->prepare($statement)…
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How Hashes Really Work
It’s easy to take hashes for granted in Perl. They are simple, fast, and they usually "just work," so people never need to know or care about how they are implemented. Sometimes, though, it’s interesting and rewarding to look…
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Acme::Comment
/* This is a Perl comment */ Commenting in Perl “But what?”, I hear you think, “Perl doesn’t have multi-line comments!” That’s true. Perl doesn’t have multiline comments. But why is that? What is wrong with them? Mostly, it…
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Proxy Objects
In your time as a Perl programmer, it becomes almost inevitable that at some point you will have to manage in-memory tree structures of some sort. When you do this, it becomes important to be aware of how Perl…
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Where Wizards Fear To Tread
One of the big new features in perl 5.8 is that we now have real working threads available to us through the threads pragma. However, for us module authors who already have to support our modules on different versions…
