June 27, 2010

Three Days in Columbus: YAPC 2010 - Day 2

My second day began with a Damian Conway talk about perl6. Here are tidbits from that and other talks:

• perl6 allows you to define new language constructs and modify current ones. Damian Conway walked us through some conversions of his current perl5 modules to perl6 that demonstrated this in full. I was completely tripping out for at least 30 minutes after the end of that session.
• You can use an apostrophe in a module name for effect because this is what :: used to be called. Hence, ACME::Don't.
• perl6 needs a CPAN, or whatever they are going to call it.
• Samy demonstrated how to build packet sniffers, ARP spoofers, and other useful utilities in perl... without depending on any c libraries. All who attended his talk bore gleeful looks of mischief as they walked out.
• George Lakoff pointed out that we should should be saying that "perl is alive" (instead of negating a frame). Mr. Lakoff makes a good point, but the lame "perl is dead" frame is so widely believed that it can be effectively countered with direct force.
• Perl needs marketing. Actually, CPAN needs marketing.

June 23, 2010

Three Days in Columbus: YAPC 2010 - Day 1

Columbus, Ohio is a college town that reminds me a lot Nashville, Tennessee where I spent Summers growing up. Like my childhood Summers, YAPC 2010 was a learning experience. And the beer was good, thanks to the generosity of fellow perl mongers!

I went to a lot of talks and found out many interesting things. Here are some tidbits:

• Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's starman web server has lots of potential in the high-performance space.
• Installing your cpan modules in your home dir using local::lib is gaining acceptance. Why did we ever need to talk to the sysadmins to do perl dev?
• Doh, I should have built my mega API project using Catalyst::Controller::DBIC::API
• CPAN development is a lot easier now with Dist::Zilla. It uses a set of configurations and plugins to version, pack, and upload your module to CPAN.
• perl5 is brimming with new features, and so is cpan. A few of my favorites:


• defined-or operator: $age //= 100
• method signatures
• MOOSE and MOOSE roles, among the most perlish things to happen to perl, yet I first started using dependency injection in java and ruby
• perl6 rocks
• today's perl5 and cpan are a good way to learn perl6.
• Human processing: don't over-engineer something that can be done by an hour of repetitive work using the world's best computer.
• DBIx::Connector looks like a nice alternative Apache::DBI except that it does not require a mod_perl container. It does not cache the connection, just makes sure that it is available.

Ok, well, that was day one. I'll add more tomorrow...

June 13, 2010

Why we should call them "postmodern databases"

After many years developing applications on mysql, oracle, and postgres, I recently decided to cast aside my biases against high-performance, weakly-consistent data stores and delve into CouchDB and its illustrious ilk. I am excited by the prospect of flexibility and high-availability.

This type of database has been begging for a name ever since BerkeleyDB reigned. It probably should refer to what it is (and not what it isn't). so out the window we should throw the term "nosql". Following that should be "structured storage", which does not fully differentiate it from a relational database. On our march to O'rielly conferences, blog posts, and constant twitterings we should guide the terminology for clarity and for posterity.

After all, we don't want another AJAX or Web 2.0 on our key-flattened fingertips.

So, what is a clear way to refer to a database that favors availability over integrity? I just read an account of a talk at Southeast Linux Fest in which Richard Hipp referred to them as "postmodern databases."

Which is a great way to put it. When I hear this in my mind, I laugh because I am reminded of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. According to Baudrillard's way of looking at things, we are so deep in simulation that we no longer even know what is original, or even what original is.

The postmodern database is the appropriate technology for our age of mutability and interconnectedness, a world in which our need to instantaneously connect to each other and to connect to our knowledge is more important than "properly" categorizing and extracting meaning.

We can always write processes later on to cull postmodern data and diligently pack it into something "tried and true".

Meanwhile, real people have seemingly figured everything out.

June 2, 2010

Perl Upgrade to Semantic Wave

I just upgraded Semantic Wave to use a more recent version of Movable Type, and also folded in some Catalyst/DBIx::Class integration. This means that there will be no more serving of MT output using JSP pages, although apache will continue to respect old links ending in jsp.

These subtle changes should put me in much better form for the upcoming YAPC 2010!