use Perl

The eclipse-perl integration project has made an impressive come back from a long time of very low activity:

After more than two years since the last release, an updated version of EPIC is now available. This version works with Eclipse 3.2, has a completely rewritten parser, many bug fixes and several new features (see ChangeLog). At this point, the stable and testing versions are identical. However, new features will be only provided through the testing version, while stable will be updated only with bug fixes. Both versions can be installed and kept up-to-date using Eclipse's Update Manager.

See the changelog for bug fixes and new features

We've been using EPIC for more than two years now and this looks like this'll get us a lot of productivity for free.

We recently tried to deploy an application on a new machine (x86_64, Suse Linux 10) but couldn't get Crypt::SSLeay to compile which we need to do SSL-Requests through LWP.

As an alternative we implemented a new Protocol-Implementor for LWP that makes https requests using wget. Of course, we found out that wget had really buggy http header handling until version 1.10 which is not widely deployd yet. But once you install the new version it works fine. The module supports basic authentication, http headers, get and post which is enough to use it as a transport layer for SOAP::Lite.

There are probably quite a few bugs lurking in this thing and it only really works with newer version of wget, but it might still be interesting for some desperate people :)

If people are interested we'll release it to CPAN once things have settled done here a little.

We are looking for new Perl developers. What we really want are hardcore, geek programmers. If that doens't fit you 100% that's alright, though. More Info on jobs.perl.org and on our site.

We are doing some very interesting projects right now with a wide variety of technologies. If you can work on-site in Elmshorn near Hamburg, Germany please contact me :)

Following spur's tradition I'll add my summary of 2005, too

Professional

• My team turned from a being the internet department of an advertising agency to being our own little company.
• I got promoted to "Mitglied der Geschäftsleitung" which basically means the I run the store :)
• Besides being an overall good year, we gained a couple of large new customers and managed to achieve a 55% growth rate and we have fixed projects for next year which should sum up to least an extra 33% growth
• We launched an internet lottery with live broadcating of the drawings every 3 minutes
• I looked into switching our web development to Catalyst but had to find out that it's not much different than what we have been doing for 4 years now.
• We switched our source control to svn and are very happy with it
• We started using RT but found out that its just too big for us
• We started using wikimedia for knowledge management
• We will start using Trac next year
• Still with me? Want to work for us? :)

Personal

• I turned 25 - a quarter century, that is. Getting old...
• I went on a 2 weeks snowboarding vacation to austria and I just finished making a movie from it
• In fall I spend 2 weeks in greece in a very nice house righr next to the water
• My girlfriend is still with me.

Reading

• Smalltalk best Practices - Kent Beck - Must Read!
• Perl best Practices - Damian Conway - Must Read!
• Code Complete - Steve McConnel - No done yet
• Higher Order Perl - MJD - Very Good, but the books wants to talk to Ex-C programmers and I am an ex-smalltalk programmer.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler - Very Good
• User Interface Design - Joel Spolsky - Not convinced
• Joel on Software - Joel Spolsky - Funny
• The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson - Masterpiece
• Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson - Masterpiece
• Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson - Masterpiece
• The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - alright
• Digital Fortress - Dan Brown - sucks bad
• Angels & Demons - Dan Brown - alright

Next year I'll read more tech books and everything by Neal Stephenson that I haven't read yet

I made a first step at above module (see my last journal entry) by implementing what I need myself :). The problem is, that I'm really not the right guy for the job - I didn't even know how to use sprintf until yesterday. DTAUS as a format really sucks. I guess the decision not to use line feed and/or carriage return for record separation was made for interoperability, but I think they should as least have made them optional, so that my shell doesn't scream at me all day.

Python and PHP both have DTAUS implementation. The PHP one, however, doesn't have documentation and the python implementation uses CSV-Files as it's API. There is a nice Ruby implementation, though. I think I'll steal it's API.

The API is a tough thing anyway. The first question that arises is whether to use english or german words since the format is solely used in the German banking system and it is sometimes hard to find exact english translations for all the special words.

Ah, well, back to work

Does anybody know of a Perl-Module to create DTAUS-files for money exchange in the german banking system? I have found this. But the code looks really trashy and it uses a weird home grown GPL-like viral licence that doesn't seem very suitable for commercial projects.

If there isn't something like this already, I guess it is a perfect fit for the Business::DE::* Namespace on CPAN.

One major point that is missing from most MVC frameworks in my opinion is a solid integration with content management systems.

Most dynamic websites will also have some kind of content component. In some situations you might get away with generating static pages with the CMS while using the same basic template for the dynamic pages. However, for more complex pages where you might want to do cross-selling on all pages or you want to have the dynamic pages integrated into the navigation which is generated by the CMS this won't work for you.

The solution is a system that fully integrates static and dynamic pages in a single system. What we did for this website was to add an extra field to the article entity of the content management system. You can now tell an article that it really is a dynamic page with a certain action for the MVC framework. Links to this article within the CMS will now automagically point to the controller of the MVC framework and the controller knows that while generating the page it is supposed to take the article from the CMS to complete it's page generation.

In the project above we used a proprietary content management system with a proprietary MVC framework. We are considering switching all our development to Catalyst. Build in integration with a system like Bricolage (and something that is easier to install than Bricolage) would be a big selling point.

For some good music I can really recommend the radio station from vienna, austria fm4. Their stream is windows media player only unfortunately. It's located at mms://stream1.orf.at/fm4_live