Once again I attended the Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC), and again it was at IIT in Chicago (same as in 2006.) Josh McAdams and his wife did a great job organizing the conference.
YAPC is an affordable ($100 conference fee) organized by volunteers for The Perl Foundation (TPF).
I’m already an experienced perl programmer, but perl is a vast programming environment and one can always learn more about techniques or available modules.
After the 3-day YAPC, I went to the 2-day Perl Catalyst framework class.
Overall, I would say that the talks were not as technical as previous years, but with 3 tracks there was always something interesting.
Many people make up their own “hallway track” anyway, since most of the perl heavyweights come each year and are very accessible.
The IIT dorm was only $60/night, but even that was over-priced. Some investment is needed in maintenance, and the attendants need to actually hand out linens and control the AC next time.
Although there was supposed to be an online form to add cash to the access card, one has to go to 201 Hermann Hall while they get organized.
Here’s my notes on some of the events that were memorable:
Monday
Tiny Modules, Adam Kennedy
- no dependencies on other modules
- fast to load
- fast to run (near real-time)
Config::Tiny (popular module)
XML::Tiny
Object::Tiny
Date::Tiny
Moving to mod_perl2, Jim Brandt
- Apache2::Compat can be used for backward compatibility
- some methods have different arguments now though
- loads everything, so uses a lot of memory
- slower because some code is now Perl instead of C
- content_language, write_client, send_http_header, get_remote_addr, etc.
Porting Tools
- Apache2::Reload
- Apache2::porting
Also read your error log and the Migration manual.
Apache::Registry is now Mod_perl::Registry
Photo Processing for the Web, Kent Cowgill
kentcowgill.net
- bunch of stuff for managing cell phone photos
- speaker talked about various image processing and mgmt. problems with his old nokia cameraphone
- embed iso in a pdf
- bought a real camera, problems went away
PAR+FUSE+PDF, Chris Dolan
Tuesday
HTML::App Framework, Jim Krajewski
Catalyst, Matt Trout
- a profane overview of handlers
- 490 CPAN Catalyst modules
Catalyst Downsides
- need packager for catalyst apps
- attribute syntax
- unaccelerated CGI not great (lack of persistence, slow to start)?
Dinner and Auction
- quite a variety of food: mediterranean, italian, indian, american
- dozens of books and t-shirts to bid on
- Wii games
Wednesday
Perl Lightning Talks
swish-e
- command line search tool
- now has perl interface, solid
cons
- no utf8
- not pi
- no index updates
- swish3 should fix that
joshr.com/src/docs
linux journal
where2getit.com
- AJAX maps with mod_perl
- openlayers, prototype, scriptaculous
- rewrote 100kloc old perl app into 22klog perl plus JS
Chemchains Sandbox
- boolean logic to understand and visualize myriad possible chemical reaction pathways
Math::Combinatorics
- works at bookfinder.com
- generate test data on authors using perl, then test clustering techniques
Devel::Cover::TT
Ingy strip show
Do You Believe in the Users?, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
- slide deck suggesting that developers focus on end user experience
- interesting graphical line added to most graphs accounting for programmer pain/cost
The Perl Foundation (TPF) Keynote, Richard Dice
Nokia 810
I talked to a fellow field-testing a Nokia 810 and keyboard as a notebook replacement before his next trip. He seemed pretty happy overall. He said he had to do a couple days of setup to get it working to his liking.
Thursday and Friday
Catalyst Class by Jonathan Rockway in association with Stonehenge
- Jon wrote a book on Catalyst and is a core catalyst programmer, less active at committing now.
- class actually a busy 2-day lab, not a lecture
- install Catalyst from CPAN (65 minutes!)
- also went over DBIx and sqlite
- modify various sample programs, like a small wiki and address book.
Thanks to the many corporate sponsors.