Spent an interesting morning in the company of many Perl mongers at the London Perl Workshop. Although I don’t use Perl as my primary language any more, it was was interesting to learn about the current movements of its London-based community. The talks I attended were:

• The Complete History of the Perle Mongers of Olde London Towne – Dave Cross
• DBIx::Class for (advanced) beginners‎ – Leo Lapworth
• closures for fun and maybe profit‎ – David Cantrell
• Catalyst, DBIx::Class and PostgreSQL -‎ Matt Trout
• ‎Introduction to Moose – Mike Whitaker

In particular, DBIx::Class caught my eye as a nice way of abstracting database details behind more friendly object methods. Although, as the list of contributors shows, this is a highly complex problem to solve and achieving a “one size fits all” solution may be unrealistic.

Matt Trout’s talk was a little disappointing. Although I admired his passion and enthusiasm, there was far too much crammed in the 40 minute talk. Just concentrating on one aspect of the development process would been more useful. However, saying that, he did enough to convince me that I need to revisit PostgreSQL at some point in the future.

My colleague Mike Whitaker talked about the “postmodern object system”, Moose. There was lots of questions by the end of the talk, which was a good sign that the introduction had achieved its aim.

Overall, a good experience and a reminder that the Perl community is very much alive and well.

• London Perl Workshop

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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