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…
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…
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Unraveling Code with the Debugger
Many people who work with Perl code never touch the debugger. My goal in this article is to provide reasoned argument for adding the Perl debugger to your set of tools, as well as pointers on how to do…
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Using Ajax from Perl
If you’re even remotely connected to web development, you can’t have failed to have heard of Ajax at some point in the last year. It probably sounded like the latest buzzword and was one of those things you stuck…
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Advanced Subroutine Techniques
In “Making Sense of Subroutines,” I wrote about what subroutines are and why you want to use them. This article expands on that topic, discussing some of the more common techniques for subroutines to make them even more useful….
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Managing Rich Data Structures
As a Perl beginner, I wrote many scripts that created text files to store snippets of data. Eventually I had hundreds of little text files in a data directory, each one holding one piece of information in the form…
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Debugging and Profiling mod_perl Applications
Because of the added complexity of being inside of the Apache web server, debugging mod_perl applications is often not as straightforward as it is with regular Perl programs or CGIs. Is the problem with your code, Apache, a CPAN…
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Test-Driving X11 GUIs
Driving X11 GUIs using X11::GUITest Introduction Interfaces to GUI applications like DCOP or D-BUS allow you to interact with GUI applications in order to get at their internal states or set some arbitrary states. Sometimes GUIs don’t allow for…
