YAPC::NA 2005 - Abstracts

yapc: Yet Another Perl Conference
North America 2005 - June 27-29

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Abstracts

Opening Ceremonies

The obligatory welcome speech.

Opening Keynote: Larry Wall

Larry will be speaking... about something.

Allison Randal: State of the Carrot 2004 - 2005

A whirlwind tour of the past 12 months of Perl. New and improved, and 100% carrot joke free!

Pete Krawczyk: The Tester's Toolkit - Start Testing Your Projects Today

With deadlines, budget pressures and scope uncertainty, testing can be one of the first things many software developers leave out of their schedule. Testing is often forgotten until a project is nearing completion at which point the perceived cost of testing is too high to justify expense. You can still test to your heart's content without having to have management approval. Testing works even if it's just you doing it, even if you're the only person on the project. Life doesn't have to be this way. Automated testing carries benefits that are loved by those who use it, and often misunderstood by those who haven't tried it.

Matt Rice: The Linux Professional Institute and Perl

A discussion regarding the not-for-profit Linux Professional Institute, its experiences with forging a Linux certification out of a community-driven process, and a chance to dialog with the Perl community regarding a larger LAMP certification.

Peter Scott: Taming Legacy Perl

How to reformat and edit bad code
How to write tests for legacy code
Wrapping warnings and "use strict" around legacy code
How to debug troublesome applications
Analyzing legacy programs

Jim Brandt: Enterprise Workflow and Procurement Integration with Perl

The University at Buffalo is a large campus with extensive purchasing needs. People at the university purchase everything from highlighters and pens to radioactive material for experiments. As a public institution we have strict rules for where, how, and by whom things can be purchased. In the past, the system works nearly all on paper. A project was initiated to make the process paperless and the solution combined a Perl web application with a commercial workflow product called Ultimus.

Keith Grennan: Sxip Homesites and Membersites - Perl-Powered Identity Web Services

The Sxip Network is a simple, secure and open digital identity network. This talk will explore technologies that power Sxip Network Homesites and Membersites. On the Sxip Network, the Homesite is the user's trusted identity repository, a Web service that employs many modern Web and security-related technologies to provide a simple, secure user experience. The Homesite is powered by Class::DBI, Template Toolkit, and Yet Another Web Dispatcher. The Perl Membersite Dev Kit (MDK) is a downloadable kit containing APIs and sample code for integrating SXIP functionality into a website in order to deploy it as a Membersite. We will discuss the architecture in detail and how a web service can be developed quickly in Perl.

chromatic & Ian Langworth: Solutions To Common Testing Problems

This talk presents excerpts from the book by myself and Ian Langworth on test modules you should know, test techniques you'll otherwise have to discover on your own, and hard-won knowledge from people who've solved the testing problems you're likely to face. In particular, we'll concentrate on techniques for testing websites, database testing tricks, and writing testing libraries and custom testing harnesses.

Geoffrey Young: Writing Tests with Apache-Test, Part II

At last year's YAPC, between the beer and buffalo wings, you got to know the basics of Apache-Test. Now, it's time to get familiar with what really makes it a really valuable testing platform. Apache-Test allows you to run tests directly within the mod_perl runtime environment, providing the ability to exercise server-side APIs in a way no other testing framework can. If mod_perl is your thing, you absolutely need to check this out.

Michael Schout: mod_perl Authentication With Apache::AuthCookie

If you have written more than a few mod_perl applications, you have almost certainly needed to add authentication to at least some of these applications. But what do you do when basic HTTP authentication is not sufficient for your needs? This presentation introduces developers to cookie based authentication frameworks using Apache::AuthCookie and Apache::AuthTicket.

Dorian Taylor: Abstracting the Apache Configuration API

The Apache configuration customization API, although made available for exploitation by mod_perl developers, still closely mimics the 'C' API and has still yet to take true advantage of Perl's more abstract features. I intend to demonstrate a suite of modules and samples that will extend and abstract the mod_perl configuration API. This will allow for more concise and understandable code that lends itself to the style of programming more familiar to Perl developers, to produce a result familiar to system administrators.

Brian Ingerson: Writing Kwiki Plugins

You will learn the ins and outs of writing Kwiki plug-in modules and the generic Spiffy and Spoon object oriented framework that Kwiki is built on top of. Kwiki is perhaps the most extensible wiki software available. Kwiki's architectural goal is simple: "When you combine a given set of Kwiki plug-ins, everything will Just Work." By writing Kwiki plug-ins you can manipulate the core software into almost anything you want.

Marc Prewitt & Jim Keenan: Phalanx from the Trenches: A Local Perl Users Group's Experiences

How we as members of a local Perl users' group organized ourselves to participate in the Phalanx project, what we accomplished, and what obstacles we had to overcome.

Geoffrey Young: A Few Cool Things About mod_perl 2.0

mod_perl 2.0 is certainly a lot to digest. But hidden deep in the recesses of this new release are lots of features that you won't find at the forefront of the typical "why mod_perl 2.0" discussion but which are super cool. Oh, and they are important to your migration strategy too. This talk will outline a few of the important but lesser known features of mod_perl 2.0 that will get you thinking in new directions as you migrate away from mod_perl 1.0.

Stig Brautaset: Testing C projects with Perl

Demonstrate how using Perl, Test::Harness and libtap can take the pain out of testing in 'C'. The whole process from writing tests (in 'C', using libtap, and in Perl, using Test::More) to running the tests under Test::Harness via Automake will be covered. (libtap is a 'C' implementation of the Test Anything Protocol (TAP), the protocol used by Perl's Test::Harness.)

José Castro: Perl Black Magic unleashed - Obfuscation and Golfing

Everything you always wanted to know about Obfuscation and Golfing, some strange techniques and odd operators many are not aware of, the three rules of Obfuscation and many more.

Daniel Wright: AnyData - A Case Study

Projects always start out small and then end up growing bigger. Sooner or later you will find yourself trying to migrate your data store from one file format to another. 'AnyData' is a wonderful tool that will help you manage your data store regardless of what format it is in and allows you to change your storage format without changing much code.

Autrijus Tang: Apocalypse Now - Perl6 is Here Today

This talk covers the current state of Pugs project, a working Perl 6 implementation, and how to join its development. Just when it seemed like Perl6 was taking a wee bit longer than expected, Pugs is a working Perl6 interpreter created in a few short weeks based on Larry's latest Synopses series. This talk will present the state of the Pugs project, as well as how to start hacking it.

Abigail: Lexical::Attributes

I discuss my 10 year relationship with Perl objects and will show the problems that traditional, hash-based Perl objects have. Over the years various techniques have been developed to solve the problems, eventually leading to inside-out objects (recommended in Damian's new book "Perl Best Practises"), and the module Lexical::Attributes which hides the implementation of inside-out objects behind syntax borrowed from Perl6.

brian d foy: Learning Perl

This is a brief introduction to Learning Perl, intended for the people at the conference who are not currently fully proficient Perl programmers. It is presented by brian d foy, one of the professional Perl instructors of Stonehenge Consulting Services, as the Stonehenge sponsorship of YAPC::NA.

Stephen Jenkins: Offline Programmatic Generation of Web Pages

As programmers, when we need to provide web-accessible information, two methods usually come to mind: a static one - creating web pages in an editor or web development tool; and a dynamic one - creating CGI programs to generate HTML. There is however a third, often overlooked option: offline programmatic generation of web pages (OPG). OPG describes writing programs to generate HTML documents at the time and location of your choosing, as opposed to CGI programs where the pages are generated at access time, on the computer hosting the web server. In this presentation we will spend time discussing the pros and cons of OPG and some of the things it is best used for.

David Rolsky: Perl Modules for Exceptions, Logging, and Parameter Validation

It's often better to give up in a controlled manner than to forge ahead and generate garbage output. With good parameter validation, error handling and logging, you can make sure that your programs fail predictably and deal with those failures in a useful way. This talk covers a few different programming practices that can improve the quality of your code focusing on available CPAN modules for these practices. First we cover parameter validation, assertions, and design by contract programming. Next we talk about error handling, specifically return codes and exceptions. Finally we examine logging. The goal of this presentation is to help you expand your toolkit for writing reliable code in a defensive programming style.

Mark Fowler: Using utf-8 in Perl

Perl and utf-8 isn't hard, it's just tricky. This talk covers the basic tricks you need to know to get started with character encodings and Perl.

Kevin Scaldeferri: How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl

This session will discuss the challenges of building complex services that can handle very high query rates with low latency and high availability. At Yahoo! Search Marketing, formerly Overture, we have developed a number of systems that have successfully scaled over several orders of magnitude in both data volume and query rate, and I will discuss the ideas behind some of these.

Luke Palmer: A Language For Games

Introduces and discusses the Glop (Game Language of Perl) library, a collection of modules designed to make game programming as easy as Perl makes text processing.

Walt Mankowski: Using Graph Theory to Detect Security Policy Violators

This talk describes the preliminary results in using Perl and graph theory to find possible abusers of Drexel's email system. We began with a simple assumption -- that legitimate users of the system will tend to exchange emails with each other. We built a graph of a year's worth of email traffic, and found the connected components of the graph. The vast majority of users fell into one large strong set. Those who were outliers merited closer scrutiny.

john saylor: 'vexations in perl' or 'control loops for serious immobility'

Erik Satie, an obscure and deceased french composer scribbled a few musical fragments with some performance instructions and called it 'vexations'. This is about how I took his instructions, added a few wrinkles of my own, and wrote a perl script to generate a MIDI file.

Shawn Sorichetti: Making the switch: DBI to Class::DBI

Trying to figure out a procedure in Class::DBI that you know how to do with DBI? This talk takes a number of common place DBI/SQL idioms and shows how they're done in Class::DBI.

Patrick Michaud: Status of the Perl 6 compiler

Near the end of 2004, the Perl 6 specifications finally reached sufficient maturity to begin implementation of a Perl 6 compiler that targets the Parrot runtime environment. This presentation will provide attendees with the current status of the implementation of the Perl 6 compiler including milestones reached, items to be completed next, and a brief history of the compiler's development.

Steve Purkis: International Address Parsing with Perl

Introduce the difficulties of parsing international addresses, and examine ways of tackling address parsing with Perl. Address parsing, or breaking addresses up into elements that can be used for geocoding or formatting is hard. It's a very small subset of natural language processing (which is even harder!), and while addresses tend to be quite structured, the structures themselves vary from country to country and language to language. What's more, the way an address is written down depends largely on the person writing it.

Marina Greenstein: Perl Programing with DB2

This presentation demonstrates how to connect to DB2 database, how to update data in that database and how to retrieve those data.

Chip Salzenberg & Dan Sugalski: Parrot: Present and Future

What is Parrot's architecture? What will it be by the time it's released as 1.0? Nobody knows, but the best guesses in the world will come from Chip and Dan.

Daniel Yacob: Regular Expressions for Syllabaries

Imagine how regular expressions might be different had they originated by users of a non-Roman writing system? The presentation explores regular expressions developed around the requirements of syllabaries which are two and even three-dimensional writing systems. Practical examples are presented by applying the capabilities of the Regexp::Ethiopic module.

Steve Purkis: High-Availability & DBI

Implementing high-availability MySQL database connections with the DBI in a production environment.

Barbie: "Wyt ti'n medru siarad Saesneg?" and why need a phrasebook

Phrasebooks are a part of life. When travelling from country to country, a handy phrasebook can be a lifesaver in getting yourself understood. The same is true of computing. Having a phrasebook to translate error codes to meaningful descriptions or websites text into specific languages can save a lot of time and effort for the programmer and user.

Casey West: Beyond the Basics of Class::DBI

Class::DBI is an excellent example of software that brings you to the infamous 80/20 rule. When you need just a little more functionality out of your object relational mapper Class::DBI usually has a solution for that. In this talk we'll explore many of the incredible, complex features and plug-ins available for the CDBI platform to take you the rest of the way, and learn how to create our own plug-ins for release on the CPAN.

Patrick Michaud: PGE - The Perl/Parrot Grammar Engine

One of the key features of Perl 5 was its built-in support for regular expressions; indeed, Perl 5's regular expressions were so popular that they have become standard in a wide variety of other systems and languages. Perl 6 has redesigned Perl 5 regular expressions and turned them into "Perl 6 rules" complete with grammars. At the heart of implementing Perl 6 rules will be the "Perl/Parrot Grammar Engine", or PGE. PGE has been designed and implemented as a Parrot compiler so that any Parrot-based language can compile and make use of pattern-matching rules using the Perl 6 rules syntax. This presentation provides a complete and detailed overview of PGE--its design, implementation, the latest version of the Perl 6 rules syntax, and its internal construction. The presentation will briefly review the Perl 6 rules syntax, demonstrate how PGE interfaces with Parrot and other languages, examine the code generated by PGE, and describe how it forms the basis of the Perl 6 to Parrot compiler.

David Rolsky: Perl DateTime Project

The Perl DateTime project was started at the beginning of 2003 to create a set of interoperable modules covering all aspects of date/time programming. Since the beginning of the project, several dozen modules have been created including a core date/time object, time zone modules, modules for numerous non-Gregorian calendars, formatting and parsing, and much more. This presentation will show you how to solve date/time programming problems using modules from DateTime project. Some of the areas covered will include how to handle data in for date/times in multiple time zones, date/time math, localization, formatting and parsing, set math with date/times, and more.

Dan Friedman: Getting your data from there to here: Class::DBI::DataMigration

Redesigning a database is often a challenging but refreshing chance to clean up and reorganize your data. However you are often left with a bunch of data in the legacy database that needs to be migrated from the old schema to the new one. Having solved this problem a few times, and realizing I was going to have to solve it on an ongoing basis, I got lazy and wrote a framework.

Casey West: Managing Email with Perl

This talk covers the Perl Email project in great detail. It outlines the current capabilities of the project, and its future directions. I will talk you through a handfull of interesting use cases. You will learn everything from sending email to stripping attachments.

Andy Lester: Project estimation and tracking that works

Embarrassing bugs, late-night phone calls and impossible schedules are all crises no one wants, but are all too common. Don't accept them as inevitable, prevent them! Learn how to change from scapegoat to rock star, and bring back the joy of development.

Perrin Harkins: MVC Web Development with Perl

There are many frameworks for applying the model-view-controller (MVC) approach to web development and Perl has no shortage of them. This talk will look at some of the most popular options available and compare a sample application in each of them, in order to help developers make an informed choice.

Dan Sugalski: Where did my memory go?

Figuring out how much memory Perl is using and where it's using it can be a tricky thing. By the end of this presentation we hope we'll have turned the subject from a black art to at least a middle-grey one covering the following topics: figuring out where Perl uses memory, techniques to reduce memory usage, places where Perl uses memory you might not expect, and quantifying Perl's memory usage.

Joe McMahon: Lazy test development

Traditionally, writing tests and debuging have been disjoint activities. You either were debugging, or you were writing tests. We look at using some of the debugger's documented interfaces in slightly nonstandard ways to allow us to integrate Test::More into the debugger and how to use these interfaces to add new behavior to the debugger to save tests done during a debugger session.

David Rolsky: Introduction to Mason

An introduction to Mason that will cover many of Mason's features, including its templating syntax, code re-use oriented features like autohandlers and dhandlers, and caching. It will also cover Mason's integration with mod_perl and plain CGI. Finally, we'll take a look at Mason subrequests, Mason's "OO" attributes and methods, component calls with content, using Mason outside of the web, and implementing an MVC architecture with Mason.

Yuval Kogman: Safe Sex in the 70s

Safe sex in the 70s Post-mortum conclusions about robustness, KISS and the waterbed theory in program design and implementation. The talk goes through some real examples, each trying to solve a hairy problem, where incorrect results or behavior are a serious problem and should be designed out of the system.

Casey West: Five Development Tools I Can't Live Without

There are some tools you can't live without and Perl has some very nice gems. You need to have easy access to documentation, easy ways to test and measure success, and utilities to help you port your code. The CPAN has a handful of indispensable projects you need to know about.

Ivor Williams: Portable Perl - how to write code that will work everywhere

CPAN modules should be usable by everybody, not just for a single platform. Despite the fact that people have gone to great lengths making Perl portable, there are many issues that can cause code to break when run on a different platform from the one on which it was developed. But if you follow the rules set out in perlport, you should be able to write code that will work everywhere.

Michael Peters: Introduction to CGI::Application

With so many MVC frameworks currently being developed for Perl, sometimes it's hard to reach the level of abstraction you want and still be completely in control. CGI::Application has been a mainstay in object oriented web development since it was first introduced to the Perl community in 2000 (and PHP in 2004). Now it is even easier to build a custom, reusable framework taking advantage of community best practices by using plug-ins.

Brian Ingerson: Building Data Driven Test Frameworks (and actually enjoying it!)

If you are like Ingy, you hate writing Perl tests because they end up being lots of code that is not reusable, time consuming to set up, painful to maintain, and worst of all: *ugly*. No more! Brian Ingerson will teach you his new testing techniques that concentrate on your inputs and outputs, minimize the the need for code, and make everything highly reusable. It will change the way you see testing, and maybe change your life.

José Castro: Perl Blue Magic - Creating Perl Modules and Using the CPAN

The talk will follow the creation of module since the very first idea, up to it being in a mature state on CPAN, being maintained. All the usual stages will be followed chronologically, and will include: naming the module, design decisions (exporting, OOP or not, etc), testing, version numbers, files in the distribution, best practices to follow, common mistakes, etc.

Michael Peters: Pluggable Web Apps with CGI::Application and Perl

This presentation will look at recent developments in CGI::Application that allow greater resuability of structure with a specific focus on plug-in-based features. These plug-ins allow the developer to concentrate on application specific business logic while incorporating community best practices for needs like templating, form validation, session handling, logging and configuration. We'll step through the creation of a project base class using plug-ins and end up with a reusable base for almost any web application. We'll also look at what resources are available for plug-in developers and how you can turn your favorite module into a plug-in for CGI::Application.

Brian Ingerson: Perldoc - New Tools for Perl Documentation

Perldoc is a new suite of tools that moves Perl documentation beyond Pod while remaining 100% backwards compatible with Pod. In this talk you will learn about Perldoc.pm and friends, a set of tools that gives you much more power, flexibility and ease of use in your Perl documentation. It will cover Perldoc syntax dialects such as Pod and Kwid, talk about the Perldoc Object Model and streaming vs DOM operations. It will also show new ways to layout your doc such that sections can be reordered. and finally the ideas in Perldoc that have been proposed to become standard in Perl 6.

Barbie: Preparing for CPAN

When creating distributions for CPAN, it is very easy to catch obvious mistakes or popular misunderstandings if you know about them. A sizable proportion of failure reports from cpan-testers could be avoided, if there were a common set of known issues. This talk aims to list a few, and provide some answers.

Michael Graham: CGI::Application::Framework

CGI::Application::Framework is a ready-to-use web development framework that integrates a lot of powerful CPAN modules. It makes it easy to write web applications using templates, sessioning, login forms, form validation and more.

R Geoffrey Avery: Lightning Talks

Why would you want to do a Lightning Talk? Maybe you've never given a talk before, and you'd like to start small. You don't need to make slides, and if you do decide to make slides, you only need to make three. Maybe you're nervous and you're afraid you'll mess up. It's a lot easier to plan and deliver a five minute talk than it is to deliver a long talk. And if you do mess up, at least the painful part will be over quickly. Maybe you don't have much to say. Maybe you just want to ask a question, or invite people to help you with your project, or boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about.

Closing Keynote

Some things are best left unsaid. This is one of them. Good Perl and good times are assured.

Town Hall Meeting

A general free-for-all discussing what needs to be discussed.