[VPM] Victoria Perl Mongers meeting tomorrow

[Peter Scott]

Victoria.pm will meet at its regular date, time, and place tomorrow, 
Tuesday, November 16, 7pm, at UVic.  The location is Harry Hickman 
Building room 120 (the Building Formerly Known As the Centre for 
Innovative Teaching).  See http://uvic.ca for maps if necessary.

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Darren Duncan will give a sequel to his July 20th presentation, which 
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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Other topics to be covered as time permits; make requests for anything 
particular.

I would also like to see a future presentation by someone that can talk 
about how Perl is being used in a commercial application or something 
of the same scale that they are familiar with.

(Courtesy copy to VLUG members by permission of the list 
manager.  Victoria.pm's home page is <http://victoria.pm.org/>.)
-- 
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
http://www.perldebugged.com/
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