[Buffalo-pm] YAPC

Kevin Eye eye at buffalo.edu
Tue Jul 5 08:24:58 PDT 2005


>> For those of you who went...
>>
>> How was it? What talks did you go to? What did Larry have to say?

It looks like speakers will be uploading their slides and possibly 
audio and video to an interactive version of the schedule here:
http://hew.ca/cgi-bin/page.pl?Day=Day%201

Also, there were "official" video recordings of most talks, which, for 
speakers who have given consent, will be available for download in a 
while after they've been processed.

Larry spoke about community building, particularly about how it's full 
of contradictions. It was full of metaphors (his usual style) for 
community structures, including lots of pictures of carefully 
engineered structures and neatly stacked stones illustrating hierarchy 
and balance, followed by the open source geek version of community -- a 
thousand jagged rocks dumped out next to each other.

Allison Randal gave status updates on perl 5 and perl 6, and also 
mentioned that the perl foundation is using a new onion logo because 
the camel, being owned by O'Reilly, isn't legally appropriate in many 
situations. It looks like this: 
http://i.perl.org/powered/perlpowered.png  There should be usage 
guidelines on the perl foundation web site soon.

Damian Conway was notably absent from the conference, making for a 
less-than-spectacular closing keynote where Chip Salzenberg (working on 
Parrot) described how perl is more like Krav Maga than Akido. Damian 
had once proposed that perl has all the grace and beauty of Akido. Chip 
says that if we must use martial arts metaphores, Krav Maga is blunt, 
direct, and has no rules. He then a-little-too-seamlessly transitioned 
to a monologue about how he's getting seriously harassed by his 
(former) employer. More info here: http://geeksunite.net/

Other highlights for me included learning that perl 6 development is 
going in every direction at once. (How's that for TMTOWTDI?) Parrot is 
the virtual machine that will run perl 6. Ideally, it will also be an 
ideal virtual machine to run Python, Ruby, and who knows what other 
kinds of languages. However, it will not be the only way to run perl 6. 
PGE (Perl Grammar Engine) will be the official compiler for perl, and 
will compile and optimize for the Parrot VM, but may also be able to 
output for other targets. PUGS is a prototype implementation of perl 6 
which will help to experiment with the new syntax and features, and 
will stick around as an alternate compiler and runtime for perl 6 
experimentation.

There was also a lot of talk about testing (as usual), including 
discussion of several useful-looking modules: Test::Differences, 
Test::LongString, and Test::Deep for better comparisons in testing; 
Test::WWW::Mechanize for HTML testing and HTTP::Recorder to make 
WWW::Mechanize scripts; and Test::HTML::Tidy and Test::HTML::Lint for 
HTML validation. I could cover testing at one of our meetings as a part 
of writing a module when that talk comes up.

There was also plenty about databases, including a lot of buzz about 
sql-lite and DBD::SQL::Lite, a full SQL database that runs from one 
data file and needs no separate server process. Other cool database 
modules: SQL::Translator for translating between different flavors of 
SQL (Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, etc.); Class::DBI::Loader and 
Class::DBI::Loader::Relationship for automatically setting up your 
Class::DBI-based perl module from existing database tables and 
relationships; and Class::DBI::AsXML, Class::DBI::FromCGI, and 
Class::DBI::AsForm.

  - Kevin



On Jul 5, 2005, at 10:12 AM, DANIEL MAGNUSZEWSKI wrote:

> For those of you who went...
>
> How was it? What talks did you go to? What did Larry have to say?
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Buffalo-pm mailing list
> Buffalo-pm at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/buffalo-pm
>


--
Kevin Eye
Web Applications Developer
Creative Services and Marketing
University at Buffalo
330 Crofts Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
eye at buffalo.edu
phone (716) 645-5000 x1435
fax (716) 645-3765



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