What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

All | LAMP | Music | Java | Ruby | The Agilist | Musings | Commute | Ball
Main | Next month (Apr 2004) »

20040326 Friday March 26, 2004

HOWTO's make the world go around I rediscovered some old HOWTO-type materials I'd had around, stuff I'd forgotten about for ages but I realized might still be useful to some folks. And then again, it might not.

The first one was a little bit about tricks with server side includes ("SSI's") and some of the crude things you can accomplish with them that, while falling short of a "real" programming language, are surprisingly powerful. The browser detection stuff is very old and yet still very pertinent today when folks want to determine on the server side which CSS style sheet to send the browser. The other HOWTO is some notes I'd had about messing with HTTP cookies.

So I performed some minor updates on these things and reposted them:

  The SSI Mini-Tutorial  
  The HTTP Cookie Mini-Tutorial  
Open source and the internet were built on people sharing tidbits; techniques and hacks to leverage technology. So these are some small contributions. Have Fun! ( Mar 26 2004, 08:50:43 PM PST ) Permalink


20040318 Thursday March 18, 2004

Perl6: this aint your father's oldsmobile A wrote did a little writeup of my impressions of Perl6 on CMP/TechWeb's new Developer's Pipeline site.

It's definitely a case of the something old/something new/something barrowed/something blue... there's a lot of stuff in Perl6 to like and yet it seems like some of the opportunity to unclutter the language appears to have passed us by.

Oh, darn.

Anyway, my thoughts on the matter are captured here ( Mar 18 2004, 08:41:25 PM PST ) Permalink


20040316 Tuesday March 16, 2004

Packaging a Perl module I was working on moving some old materials from a tutorial I'd given at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference onto the website. Among the materials are some code samples and among those samples are Perl modules. I wanted package them so that consumers of the materials could run the familiar "perl Makefile.PL && make && make install" cycle.

Here's the deal:
The tutorial covered SOAP interoperability between implementations in Java (using Apache Axis) and Perl (using SOAP::Lite). Some components on the Perl side required writing a few little modules. Nothing CPAN-worthy but still I wanted to package the modules nicely so users of the code samples can get the Perl side running without a lot of hand-work.

I read the man page for h2xs, the perldoc for ExtUtils::MakeMaker, I grabbed ExtUtils::ModuleMaker off of the CPAN and checked out it's docs ...the latter seems like an improvement but my needs were, IMO, real simple and I just wanted an appropriately simple set of steps. In the end, I followed a procedure similar to the one described here, bascially bootstrapping the package with structure with h2xs and manually tweaking the file system layout into something nice. Makes me wish Perl had a well defined self contained packaging structure similar to Java's jars.

Of course, then I'd want ant implemented in Perl to handle the packaging! So it goes. At the end of the day, the tutorial is at last online. ( Mar 16 2004, 09:14:49 AM PST ) Permalink