Memories of 20 Years of Perl
For Perl’s 20th anniversary, several Perl programmers reflect on their experiences with the language.
Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...
I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can’t define it, but I’ll know it when I see it. Here are some common memes floating around: Simple language “Everything is a string” Rapid prototyping Glue…
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PDF Processing with Perl
Adobe’s PDF has become a standard for text documents. Most office products can export their content into PDF. However, this software reaches its limits if you want advanced tasks such as combining different PDF documents into one single document…
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Making Perl Reusable with Modules
Perl software development can occur at several levels. When first developing the idea for an application, a Perl developer may start with a short program to flesh out the necessary algorithms. After that, the next step might be to…
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Option and Configuration Processing Made Easy
When you first fire up your editor and start writing a program, it’s tempting to hardcode any settings or configuration so you can focus on the real task of getting the thing working. But as soon as you have…
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Better Code Through Destruction
Larry Wall said that Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Perl is good both for writing a two-line script that saves the world at the last minute (well, at least it saves you and your project)…
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Everyday Perl 6
Perl 6 will soon be here. How will programming in Perl 6 be different from programming in Perl 5 for your average Perl programmer? The answer is: very different yet very much the same. A Perl 6 program viewed…
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Lightning Strikes Four Times
by Mike Friedman Good software design principles tell us that we should work to separate unrelated concerns. For example, the popular Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern is common in web application designs. In MVC, separate modular components form a model, which…
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The Beauty of Perl 6 Parameter Passing
Perl 6 is not finished, but you can already play with it. I hope this article will encourage you to try it. Begin by installing Pugs, a Perl 6 compiler implemented in Haskell. Note that you will also need…
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Advanced HTML::Template: Widgets
My previous article, looked at extending HTML::Template through custom tags and filters. This article looks at ways to manage large, more complex pages, by bundling HTML::Template into something like GUI “widgets” (or “controls”). Imagine you have a basic page…
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Painless Windows Module Installation with PPM
I have recently been working on an installation package for the Microsoft Windows series of operating systems (Windows 2000 and newer). One of the primary components of this installation package is the installation of ActiveState’s distribution of Perl, known…
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Using Java Classes in Perl
I started a new job recently to refocus my career from systems administration to web development. Part of that move meant using Java as my primary language at work and using a relatively new technology from the Java Community…
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Advanced HTML::Template: Filters
The CPAN module HTML::Template is a very simple, yet extremely useful module to achieve true separation of presentation and logic when programming CGI scripts. The basic idea is that, rather than having print statements scattered all through your code…
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Hash Crash Course
When I teach about hashes, I do what most Perl tutors and tutorials do: I introduce the hash as a “dictionary”: a mapping between one thing and another. The classic example, for instance, is to have a set of…
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Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application
This article provides an update on the popular and mature CGI::Application framework for web applications. It assumes a basic understanding of the system, so reviewing the previous Perl.com article about CGI::Application may be helpful background reading. CGI::Application and Catalyst…
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The State of the Onion 10
Welcome to the tenth State of the Perl Onion. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my methods, this is the annual speech wherein I ramble on about various things that are only marginally related to the state…
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Generating UML and Sequence Diagrams
Imagine yourself in a meeting with management. You’re about to begin your third attempt to explain how to process online credit card payments. After a couple of sentences, you see some eyes glazing over. Someone says, “Perhaps you could…
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Still More Perl Lightning Articles
Using Module::Build, using Swing from Perl, turning modules into scripts, adding mocks to test fixtures-it’s time for more Perl lightning articles!
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FEAR-less Site Scraping
Imagine that you have an assignment that you need to fetch all of the web pages of a given website, scrape data from them, and transfer the data to another place, such as a database or plain files. This…
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Charting Data at the Bottom of the World
I have an odd job: I’m the only programmer for about 500 miles. I look after experiments on a remote Antarctic research station and look after the data they produce. As well as the scientific stuff knocking about, we…
