Welcome back to Perlcast! We have a great round of shows lined up for the new year starting with none other than Tim Bunce talking about the future of the Perl DBI. Based on the interview, it looks like we’ll need to take the word ‘Perl’ out from in front of DBI because it looks like Tim has big plans for the future of the distribution.
Jerrad Pierce pointed out the Perl Advent Calendar to me today, so I called him up to talk a little about what the calendar is and what we can expect. The first item is already up for everyone to enjoy. Also, don’t miss out on the Catalyst Advent Calendar over at catalystframework.org.
Just off the heels of the Chicago Perl Hack-A-Thon, which focused very much on Parrot, I have a great interview with Chip Salzenberg. Chip is a past Perl 5 Pump King and is the current Parrot Pump King.
Parrot, as many of you know, is a virtual machine that is intended be a platform for running Perl 6. Actually, the Parrot virtual machine hopes to run many languages other than Perl 6. There is currently beginning implementations of many languages on Parrot including Ruby and TCL. Parrot is different than many other virtual machines that we know of. It is register-based, as opposed to the common stack-based architectures, and it is designed to run dynamic languages.
Listen to hear what Chip has to say about the state of Parrot and what you can do to help out.
Kirsten Jones of Socialtext talked with us here at Perlcast about the REST API beta available now on thier wiki. Socialtext is a company based around a powerful wiki written largely in Perl. The wiki was recently open sourced and is available for download at SourceForge.
The 9th German Perl-Workshop will take place from Wednesday, 21 Feb. 2007 to Friday, 23 Feb.2007 and you are invited to submit proposals for talks or tutorials. We will happily accept proposals for interesting talks related to Perl.
The dates for YAPC::NA 2007 have finally been established! The Houston.pm group and YAPC::NA 2007 organizers are pleased to announce that next year’s YAPC::NA will be Monday, June 25th through Wednesday, June 27th, at the University of Houston. You can also visit the YAPC::NA homepage at www.yapc.org—America
The Vlaanderen.pm group was formed last month and are beginning to organize at vlaanderen.pm.org
Larry Wall’s State of the Onion 10 is now online on Perl.com. This talk was presented at OSCON 2006.
The Fall 2006 issue of The Perl Review is online and ready for download. Subscribers should have alread received an email telling them all about it. You can even buy TPR on the newsstand now if you shop at Powell’s Technical Books in Portland.
In this issue (besides the cover showing the Larry Wall action figure by ArtCard Mike):
Google has released a code search at www.google.com—codesearch
Bigtop 0.18 has been released along with some movies demonstrating its capabilities. Bigtop is a language for describing the data of a web application. Usually this data will be stored in a relational database. Once you have a description of your data, you can generate a web application from it. This includes all the pieces you need like: the sql statements ready for feeding to your database command line tool, the httpd.conf you need to Include in the httpd.conf on your system, the modules that will handle the web requests, the models that make the database tables look like classes, etc. Search for BigTop on CPAN to find out more.
The Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006. Nick was once the Pumpking for Perl 5 and is also a key contributor to the Tk and Encode modules. For more information, please see the Perl Foundation Blog entry at news.perlfoundation.org.
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