yesthattom | OSCON2004: Wednesday (Reply)

Opening Keynote: Tim O’Reilly gave sort of a “state of the union” explaining what’s happening in the publishing industry and in technology. One of the minor things he pointed out that piqued my interest is that ORA will be publishing a series of hardware hacking books: They already have Tivo Hacks, and now XBOX hacks, and soon a magazine called “Make” which is on hardware hacking.

Perl6: Wall and Conway gave a talk about some of the Perl6 features. Mostly they talked about the stuff that’s been added in the last few months, and it was mostly the OO feature. They claim to have gotten OO stuff right. Since I tend to use modules, not write my own, it wasn’t super interesting.

The Perl6 Compiler: Allison Randal talked about the compiler that will be part of Perl6. Perl6 will compile itself down to Parrot bytecode and then run at Parrot speeds. If you want a hint on how fast that is, someone wrote a Python-to-Parrot compiler and it runs Python code faster than Python does. Anyway, the current compiler is actually written in Perl5 because it’s just a prototype. However, she predicts that sometime this year they’ll throw out the prototype and write the new compiler from scratch, in C. However, they’ll have a much easier time of it since they’ve worked out the difficult parts in the prototype (I’m sure that having the parse tree worked out is going to help... I wonder if they’ll make an automated system that generates the C code for the parser from the Perl5 data structure).

Bricolage: The Bricolage content management system for web sites. Some large newspaper use it (so did the Howard Dean campaign). http://www.bricolage.cc is a sample site. I’m desperately looking for a system like this that NJLGC and BiZone can use, as well as others. This looks good. The difficult part is setting it up for the first time. However, they now have a sample web site that you can start from as a base.

Combust: the perl.org web framework. perl.org uses a CMS system that they wrote called Combust. Sadly, this is the opposite of what we need for my non-profits. It is a hacker tool, requiring knowledge of perl to do anything.

Lightning talks: Everyone gets 5 minutes and you have to pre-register. Ready? Go:

Code Generation -- someone from Morgan Stanley with a difficult to pronounce name -- They do everything with SOAP and have made a lot of cool stuff -- MSDW::Eclipse -- authentication -- MSDW::Quasar -- alerting -- they store the APIs in XML and generate the headers for many different languages.
CGI::Prototype.pm -- Jim Brandt & Randal Schwartz -- All CGI scripts seem to have the same sections so they made CGI::Prototype which is an engine that takes care of all the common stuff and lets you substitute in your code. It’s based on Class::Prototype.pm. TemplateToolkit makes generating the HTML easy. For example, a form page tends to repeat until data is validated, then moves to the “next page”. They are all null-stubs initially but you can plug in a validation routine, the next page routine, etc. and suddenly you have a CGI-based web app.
Perl is too slow -- PPerl and Text::QSearch -- Managers select Java because everyone knows perl is so slow (yeah right!). Either way, everyone fears the compile stage. mod_perl solves the problem for CGI scripts, but what about everything else? Uses send_fd() and rec_fd() to send to a daemon that “holds” the precompiled code running in a process. This is 10x faster than regular perl. But they wanted to make it faster, so they kept going. His next trick got it 150x faster using Aho/Carasick (that’s the Aho that used to be my boss). Text::QSearch for more info (should be released next week).
Aegis and rejecting patches -- He doesn’t like receiving patches for CVS because it’s manual and error prone and boring. So he set up a way for people to have direct access to the repository but he actually approves the changes before they really go in. He uses Aegis, an open source prequel to CVS. Aegis has “roles”. “Users” can submit requests. Others are marked as “developers”. They can pop in changes. Aegis can compile things and reject if it breaks the compilation chain. Others have “reviewer” roles and can check the code. Reviewers can accept/reject code. He can also reject requests, so this avoids the problem of people developing a patch and then being told “gosh, thanks for all that work but we don’t want the product to go in that direction.”
Helping the Third World with open source -- Thomas for Tactical Technology Collective -- In helping third world organizations set up open source systems they have the problem where people can’t download huge systems like Linux. After a number of false starts with store and forward they found a better solution: a box of CD-ROMs. They call it “NGO In A Box” and it’s great.
Introducing the Package Factory -- Daron E. Clay -- The Boeing Company -- he works in the release configuration side of development. Boeing uses a ton of Perl, and some Python, and a little PHP. PF is a Workflow tool for centralized service. Primarily ZergoG InstallAnywhere and MSI (microsoft installer). It’s a web-based system that lets people enter their package information and outputs the package under various installers. Because they use a check-in/check-out system, they can actually determine how much time a person spends on something and generate statistics for management (which sounds really cool). It uses PHP5 + Apache2 + PostgreSQL + Redhat + VMWare GSX.
Start using prove -- Andy Lester -- Goal: making “make test” cases for CPAN modules a lot easier. “prove” is a development tool that is part of Test::Harness. It’s like “make test” but it’s flexible. It’s part of core perl so there is no excuse for not using it. Interesting feature: You can randomize the order of the tests.
Rant -- Richard Turner -- Licensing is not religion... it is rocket science. A lot of files in Parrot is missing proper licence and copyright labels. Get with it, bone heads! Not sure what to do? Contact FSF and they’ll help you do it right.