[Melbourne-pm] Facebook::Slurp, Filter::Self

[Sam Watkins]

hi,

I'm writing a program in Perl to incrementally "slurp" data from
facebook, to nice YAML and TSV files (like wget -c).  It's not finished
yet but it is working for profile info and streams (your wall, others'
walls, status updates feed). I haven't got it to slurp comments yet.

The streams are presented as simple readable TSV files, for use with
grep, etc, having lines like this:

  2010/02/06 01:03:54	Sam Watkins	uploaded my first video to youtube, it's a funny thing I did with a flash game "Cargo Bridge" (armor games edition): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uguxuuAn4qo

The date comes first and is sortable! (unlike apache logs) so it's a
simple matter to merge several streams for example.

Thanks to PJF for his facebook example script which was very helpful
with getting started.  I'll post again when I've finished it.


I also wrote Filter::Self last night, it uses Damien's Filter::Simple to
add some nicer OO / function call syntax to perl.  This has I suppose
been done before, anyway you can do things like this:

  this code:              becomes:
  ----------              --------
  print .name;            print $self->{name};
  .recalc($alpha);        $self->recalc($alpha);
  sub say($str) {         sub say {
                              my ($str) = @_; 
  sub .recalc($alpha) {   sub recalc {
                              my ($self, $alpha) = @_; shift;
  print .foo.bar.baz;     print $self->{foo}{bar}{baz};

I think that makes it a lot easier / briefer to do OO in perl, it's more
like java, actually sort of inspired by visual basic!  I like this
syntax anyway.  This is pretty much finished, and there is a tgz here:

  http://sam.nipl.net/code/filter-self/

Please let me know what you think of it.

I also got a new job programming perl recently, which is good.  I should
also try to get an author account or whatever on CPAN I guess.


Sam