use Perl

For anyone interested in how perldoc.perl.org is built, I've today released the source code at http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/perldoc.

At the moment it's a bit 'rough and ready' - there's no documentation, no installer, etc - but at least it's now open source!

Happy Christmas!

Earlier this year my girlfriend and I decided to start our own business, Penny's Arcade, an online retail website to sell gifts, home accessories, and artwork.

I've spent the last couple of months developing the site, www.pennysarcade.co.uk, using Catalyst, Handel, and OpenThought, and this week we went live!

This is the first serious project I've attempted with Catalyst, and I must say it's been quite a revelation. Compared to other tools I've used the speed of development was phenominal, and combined with a very simple method of deployment and configuration I can really appreciate now why it's so popular.

Aside from OpenThought which I've talked about before, the other key module used was Handel. Handel provides facilities to manage shopping carts and orders, and was very easy to extend to allow for our own custom fields and delivery calculations.

I'll be talking in more depth about the technical details at this year's London Perl Workshop, but the short version is that the site came in under budget and ahead of schedule, with Catalyst, Handel, and OpenThought taking much of the credit. Thanks to all the module authors who made it possible!

Enjoy!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7561943.stm

Following the Perl 5.10 release, I've now updated http://perldoc.perl.org with the Perl 5.10.0 documentation.

The Perl 5.8.8 documentation is still available though, at http://perldoc.perl.org/5.8.8.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/dayintech_1218

And, as Barbie pointed out, it's very kind of Wired to even name check the software that ran the conference website and currently runs the Birmingham.pm website too ... Labyrinth :)

(*) If you don't recognise it, it's the Birmingham Perl Mongers T-shirt we gave out to attendees at YAPC::Europe 2006 :-)

I've finally got pod2pdf (used to create the PDF files on perldoc.perl.org) updated for compatibility with the latest version of PDF::API2, and packaged up into a proper CPAN release.

It is available from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/pod2pdf or http://search.cpan.org/dist/pod2pdf.

I've put together a set of scripts to dynamically apply Perl syntax highlighting to code examples on web pages.

It uses Perl::Tidy to perform the highlighting, and the OpenThought Ajax library to run the requests asynchronously so that initial page load times will not be affected by the extra processing.

Files and examples are available from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/syntaxhighlighting.

As part of the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour, I recently gave my "Excel on the Command Line" talk to the Gloucester Linux User Group.

A few days later I received an email from one of the attendees who'd tried out the accompanying software, XLSperl (which lets you use Perl one-liners to process Microsoft Excel files), with a few suggestions.

So, after a few train journeys spent hacking code I've released a new version which has the following improvements:

• The %F and @F variables (in autosplit mode) are tied, so modifying $F{A} also changes $F[0]
• You can now create Excel files from XLSperl, using the new "XLSprint" command
• XLSperl can now process plain text as well as Excel files (for easy conversion of text data into XLS format)

Source code and binaries for Linux x86, Windows, and Mac OS X (Intel) can be downloaded from http://perl.jonallen.info/projects/xlstools.