[VPM] February meeting

[Darren Duncan]

P.S. Please keep all replies on-list.

I have an update here concerning the February meeting.

I may indeed be able to do the talk this month, however at my current rate I'll need another 2 weeks before I am ready.  Therefore, I suggest having the meeting in the last week of February (in Feb 23-27).  While I expect any day will work, a wednesday or later is slightly preferred by me as I can then do other things in town (and I get more time).  But of course, whatever day the most people can make is best.

The topic would be using databases with Perl, and would focus on up and coming technologies to aid in this effort, including the one I'm making.  Said technology should actually be useable at the end of 2 weeks, tested with at least basic/common tasks.  That was the plan before, however ...

This week I learned about something else which you should all be interested in, that I can use to fill time.

An official Parrot DBI project has started, which I have joined.  This version will be written entirely in Parrot bytecode / IMC rather than the current XS/Perl dichotomy.  This core won't probably won't be used by the Parrot-hosted-language programs that you write, but each language will have a module to take care of the dirty details, with the Perl one looking like the current DBI.  We will take advantage of Parrot's Native Call Interface (NCI) feature that lets you use C shared libraries without writing any C yourself.  That would make our development of drivers et al much easier.

The email list for the PDBI development group is: dbdi-dev at perl.org

Archives for said list are at either: http://www.mail-archive.com/dbdi-dev@perl.org/maillist.html
Or:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.dbdi.dev
The first one has a problem where it doesn't show messages after February 3rd, including any threads I participated in; the second one shows them.

Tim Bunce's announcement concerning this development group and PDBI, through which I discovered it via the Perl 6 weekly summaries, is visible here:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.dbdi.dev/3
Or:
http://www.mail-archive.com/dbdi-dev@perl.org/msg00002.html

Considering this recent revelation, I am probably going to change the way I do my Rosetta project, at least at first.  My prototype is still in Perl 5 and sits on DBI as usual, which is a solid platform right now.  My next version was going to be in C, but now I'm thinking of writing it in Parrot IMC et al instead.  That will let me just distribute one version that everyone can use, rather than seperate versions for every target platform that C requires.

I will also bring that Joy of Tech cartoon book as a door prize, inscribed to our group by the artists.

-- Darren Duncan