News and Information Blog

Memories of 20 Years of Perl

The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.

Read more here

Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...

Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion describes the state of Perl, the language and the community. In his 11th address, he discussed the past, present, and future of scripting languages, including the several dimensions of design decisions important to the development of Perl 6.

Read more here

PDF Processing with Perl

Adobe's PDF is a well-established format for transferring pixel-perfect documents. It's not nearly as malleable as plain text, but several CPAN modules make creating, manipulating, and reusing PDFs much easier. Detlef Groth demonstrates how to use PDF::Reuse.

Read more here

test

Using Java Classes in Perl

Java has a huge amount of standard libraries and APIs. Some of them don't have Perl equivalents yet. Fortunately, using Java classes from Perl is easy--with Inline::Java. Andrew Hanenkamp shows you how.

Read the entire article here

Using Ajax from Perl

The recently rediscovered Ajax technique makes the client side of web programming much more useful and pleasant. However, it also means revising your existing web applications to take advantage of this new power. Dominic Mitchell shows how to use CGI::Ajax to give your Perl applications access to this new power.

Read the entire article here

Unraveling Code with the Debugger

Reading other people's code can be difficult, especially if you have no idea what happens when and where. Understanding code flow is vital to maintenance and bug fixes, but littering code with print and debugging statements is tedious and prone to error. There's another way: use the debugger! Daniel Allen demonstrates how to pinpoint a problem with Perl's debugger.

Read the entire article here

Test-Driving X11 GUIs

Is GUI testing as difficult as it seems? Maybe not, with the right testing libraries. George Nistorica shows what X11::GUITest can and can't do to make your Unix and Unix-like applications more robust.

Read the entire article here

The Beauty of Perl 6 Parameter Passing

Perl 6 isn't quite out yet, but you can learn and play with it today in various incarnations. One of the most compelling new features is a revamped and revised mechanism of parameter passing. Phil Crow demonstrates how powerful it is, and how you can gradually adopt more and more powerful constructs.

Read the entire article here

The State of the Onion 10

In Larry Wall's tenth annual State of the Onion address, he talks about raising children and programming languages and balancing competing tensions and irreconcilable desires.

Read the entire article here