Saturday 4 December 2010

Sat 4th Dec 2010: London Perl Workshop

I attended the London Perl Workshop today. The things I feel are most notable:
  • Matt Trout's extremely enthusiastic and informative talks
  • David Cross workshop on Modern Web Apps in PERL
  • DBIx::Class for Beginners by Leo Lepworth (http://leo.cuckoo.org/)
  • Perl6 Implementations (incl. Perl6 compilers written in Perl6.
  • CGI.pm is outdated and now PSGI (specification) & Plack (implementation) is the way to do web development; use Plackup to do testing; use the Catalyst framework (for example); go to http://plackperl.org for info.
  • Best book for Perl today is “Chromatics Modern Perl”


Stuff useful to me:
  • Top books to learn from: “Learning Perl”, “Programming Perl” and “Perl Cookbook”.
  • Lots of Perl stuff on http://www.enlightenedperl.org/ and perl.org
  • Stuff I should learn about: Perlanet, Catalyst, Padre, Moose, DBIx:Class, cpanmin.us, freenode #perl, Template Toolkit
  • Modules/Perl updates should all be easily available from CPAN
  • David Doorwood (http://dorward.me.uk/) did a good lightening presentation on Testing. I will look him up because this is related to my line of work.
  • There are Social Networking APIs available on CPAN such as Net::Twitter and App:Twitch

About Perl6:
  • Perl6 is specification based but there is not yet a final consensus on the specification (it is still under development).
  • You can write compilers for Perl6 in other languages other than Perl6
  • You can run Perl6 in other runtime engines other than Perl6, such as implementations of Perl5 and Lisp. The leading implementation is Rakudo
  • You can lean about compilers in the Parot Compiler Toolkit
  • You can get free training in Perl6 by going to Perl6.org
  • Perl6 as a language is good for writing compilers.
(If any one who reads this and thinks I made a mistake here with this information, please let me know.)