[VPM] presentation for November 16 meeting

Darren Duncan darren at DarrenDuncan.net
Thu Nov 11 22:55:27 CST 2004


You can put the text following the dashed line into the official 
November announcement, between the time/place paragraph and the 
"other topics" one.

Since it is unusually long, any suggestions for shortening it while 
retaining the important points are welcome; please post those on the 
list, so everyone can see them.

-- Darren Duncan

------------------

On November 16th of 2004, Darren Duncan will give a sequel to his 
July 20th presentation, that concerned how to make a trivial 
genealogy database-manager application using Perl and a SQL database, 
SQLite to be specific.

The November meeting will focus on introducing Darren's new 
CPAN-registered modules that strive to implement complete and 
rigorous cross-database portability.  The core modules are 
'SQL::Routine' and 'Rosetta', plus 'Locale::KeyedText' and 
'Rosetta::Engine::Generic'.

These modules should help you write database-using applications of 
any size, that leverage all sorts of advanced database product 
features, and support trivial (zero change) drop-in substitution 
between many dozens of database products, such as: SQLite, MySQL, 
PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Firebird, DB2, SQL Server, and more. 
Rosetta is conceptually a DBI wrapper, whose strongest addition is 
SQL generation, but it also works without DBI, and with non-SQL 
databases.  The module set's goal is similar to Java, where code 
written with it will run the same way on any platform with zero 
changes.  Its goal is to help free users and developers from database 
vendor lock-in, such as that caused by the investment in large 
quantities of vendor-specific code.  It also comes with a 
comprehensive validation suite that proves it is providing identical 
behaviour no matter what the underlying database vendor is.

Darren's modules will be demonstrated in action using a version of 
the trivial genealogy application that is modified to access the 
database engine through those modules rather than directly.  For 
simplicity, the demonstration will use the trivial-to-install SQLite 
database (DBD::SQLite 1.0.7).  The same code used in the 
demonstration will be on CPAN as a 'demo' accompanying the 'Rosetta' 
module, so it is kept in a working state over time.

Note that these modules are still bleeding-edge and pre-alpha; while 
they will work well enough next week to power the demonstration, most 
other features are not quite finished yet.


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