Perl 5: January 2008 Archives

Ha ha, trick question, there is no "best" templating system except for the one that's best for your project. Vince Veselosky has a roundup of Perl templating systems where he examines everything....

... from the Swiss Army Chainsaw of Template Toolkit, through HTML::Mason and Text::Template down to the ever-tempting "variables interpolated in a here-doc" method.... Read on for a comparison of the major template systems in Perl, and my recommendations of which systems fit which circumstances.

It's a fine introduction to the various systems, and probably worth pointing to from the Perl 5 wiki, if not reproducing it there entirely.

I'm amazed at how David Landgren manages to summarize the p5p traffic, especially this week. Last week's summary is 19K of text covering everything from what happens when you bit shift infinity, to what features people want in Perl 5.12, to outdated Test::Harness components.

Adam Kennedy is thinking about the future of Strawberry Perl.

In line with my attitude that the main Strawberry "product" should be conservative, reliable and predictable (I'm going with a rough analogy to Firefox product-wise) I've been thinking a little about how the release tempo should look. My current thinking for Strawberry Perl is to do quarterly releases, with a tentative schedule of releases in January/April/July/October and aiming at being available for download before the second Monday of the month.

In addition, he's asking for your ideas on features to include in the April 2008 release.

I've got so many little notes that don't warrant a full-blown story, so here's a link roundup:

• Perlcast interviews Curtis Poe about logic programming and Prolog. Is Fluffy a mammal?
• Adam Kennedy provides a mathematical proof that Perl is unparseable.
• chromatic is tracking down memory leaks in Parrot (but if you follow rakudo.org, you already know that).
• David Landgren has posted another of his marvelous Perl 5 Porters weekly mailing list summaries. If you want to know what's happening in Perl 5.10 (and 5.12) development, but can't handle the volume and/or high-level discussion, David's summaries are the place to go.
• Andy Armstrong has performed magic to let you instrument your Perl code with dtrace.

There, that feels much better now!

Yesterday's article about Strawberry Perl referred to a blog post with incorrect installation instructions. All the downloading and installing discussed is just not necessary, even for CPAN installations. According to Adam Kennedy:

The install and setup process for Strawberry Perl is to uninstall any existing Perl, run the installer, and then run "cpan" or run it from the Start menu. There is no additional installation required.

Note: Beware of the instructions in the link below. It has you do far more work than is necessary. See this follow-up article for details.

Here's the first big blog post I've seen about Strawberry Perl: How to install and set up Strawberry Perl

I am writing this article with much joy and glee.... Active State no longer has a monopoly on the issue of Perl on the Windows platform

I haven't read the Strawberry Perl docs, since I'm Windows-free. The blog post gives details about what tools are necessary to make the install, with links to the tools. Now, I thought that part of Strawberry Perl was that you wouldn't need any external tools, but maybe they're just for building CPAN modules.