Tag: Software Development

Improve Your Perl Programming

Brian Foy – the author of Mastering Perl and one of the famous perlmonks, wrote an article on the ONLAMP where described five ways to improve Perl programming:

  • Cleaning up your code – I also hate to read unformatted code -without tabs, proper style etc.
  • Use configuration – sure, my favorite module – Config::General.
  • Logging – log4perl should be used in all your applications.
  • Persistence – Brian suggested to use Storable or DBM::Deep but I prefer to use Cache::FileCache (it’s used in my module IMDB::Film to cache already retrieved web content).
  • Subclasses for applications – it’s good practice to implement a common functionality in the modules instead of keeping it in your script. This approach allows to have more structured application and reuse the same functionality in some other scripts.

So, generally I didn’t find anything new for me in those recommendations. I just confirmed my own point of view 🙂

use Gantry

Gantry is a new Perl Framework to develop web applications. It offers:

  • Plugin architecture
  • Support mod_perl 1.3 and 2.0
  • Support CGI and Fast-CGI
  • Support Template Toolkit and the ability to plugin other templating systems
  • Inherited framework code for a standard CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) application.
  • Calendaring support
  • Cookie management
  • Form generation and validation
  • User authentication: user, group and page-based
  • Class::DBI integration
  • Database and SQL utilities
  • AJAX Support
  • TinyMCE Support (a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor)
  • Code generation with BigTop – a Web Application Data Language processor

There are two existing, famous Perl MVC Frameworks: Maypole and Catalyst. Also the new one – Woodstock will be designed by Sebastian Riedel – the project founder of Catalyst and released soon. So, you have a choice when you decide to develop your web application on Perl.

About Java

Personally I don’t like Java because it seems like a just product of high-quality PR. I don’t want to minimize the Java importance. it’s an excellent solution for certain goals but it isn’t unique, it isn’t absolutely universal! Hovewer, Java adherents think differently. From their point of view there are not anything noteworthy except perfect, brilliant, ideal Java! James Gosling – father of Java confirmed this thesis in his interview speach at Sun’s World Wide Education & Research Conference: “Java Is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby or C#”. One of many discussions can be found there. Dear Java-programmers, please, be more modest. Other programming languages are not so weak and useless as you can think 😉