[BNE-PM] What do you use Perl for?

[Don.Simonetta at mincom.com]

I sent this yesterday. But I suspect it failed to get to the list (due to 
my email address changing in the 12 months or so since joining the list).

In summary I use perl predominantly to develop portable software. We have 
software that runs on both unix & win32; many/all flavours of unix; many 
different DBMS (oracle, db2 and sometimes sybase, informix). Occassionaly 
used for cgi too.


----- Forwarded by Don Simonetta/ATEQ/Mincom on 21-08-2002 08:19 -----


I too use perl for almost everything. Probably the most interesting of 
these is for monitoring purposes:

We have developed software (written entirely in perl) that monitors many 
aspects of computer systems including: availability; resource usage (eg 
cpu, disk etc); database availability/utilisation (eg oracle & sqlserver 
tablespace); application-specific monitoring etc etc. It runs on both unix 
& win32. Architecture: daemon process on each client machine to kick off 
processes according to a customisable cron-like schedule; client daemons 
communicate back to the call centre's Remedy system (via another daemon 
process) to instigate alarms/emails/pages/sms. A "server" machine has 2 
further daemons for monitoring the availability of the remote hosts (& 
their daemons) and for gathering statistics from the remote machines and 
storing them in an oracle database. There is also a web interface into all 
this for the purpose of maintaining schedules, pushing out new/updated 
modules, remote configurations etc.




I am implementing a C SSL toolkit for embedded systems. I generate the 
SSL presentation layer C code that reads and writes specific SSL 
handshake messages directly from the SSL specification with a Perl 
program.

The SSL spec has it's own simple language for describing the message 
format, so it's simply a matter of parsing that and then writing out 
corresponding C data structures and functions. This way I can easily 
cope with changes to message formats, and add new messages for 
supporting different SSL versions easily.

It also means I can generate "Dump" functions for each message type that 
  output an SSL message in a very nicely formatted and indented way - 
much more readable than the hex dumps you get with other SSL packages.

To do this I use the unbelievably wonderful Parser::RecDescent module 
from CPAN (http://www.cpan.org).

--
D.





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