Last Saturday was the London Perl Workshop. As always, it was a great day with a fabulous selection of talks. As always, I’m desperately waiting for the videos to appear so that I can see the talks that I was forced to miss because of clashes.
I spoke a couple of times. In the morning I ran a two-hour training course entitled “Perl in the Internet of Things”. The slides are up on Slideshare.
And, towards the end of the day I gave a lightning talk called “Return to the Kingdom of the Blind. It was a sequel to the similarly-named lightning talk I gave a couple of times last year. This year I particularly concentrated on the fact that so many people seem to cling to the idea of using CGI to write web applications when there are so many better technologies available.
I decided that part of the problem is that there are no modern Perl web development books and people are still picking up books that are fifteen years old. At the end of the talk I announced that I was planning to put that right and that I was planning to write a new book on Perl web development that would be available in time for the next London Perl Workshop.
The project has a web site, a Github repo and a Twitter feed. I hope that things will start to happen over the next couple of weeks.
Wish me luck.
Good luck 😀
Seriously though, i can take some of the stuff from the talk i gave on migrating a legacy CGI app using Mojolicious::Plugin::CGI and adapt that into a more, er, book-ish style if you’d be interested in using it? It wouldn’t be much, 3 or 4 pages at most.
luck!
While helpful for one-off development (single use), my personal problem would possibly be that it will not help OSS projects geared towards those without module installation capabilities on shared web hosting. Perl now seems to want to force some of us into other languages to solve the problems that Perl used to handle at the core or very nearly so. But this is still a good idear regardless, I would be interested in it.
People without module installation capabilities on shared web hosting are goingto have problems soon anyway. When Perl 5.22 gets on to those systems, they aren’t going to have CGI.pm either.
So, yes, I think it will lead to changes in the shared web hosting industry. Companies will either stick with core Perl – effectively saying “we aren’t interested in hosting Perl apps” – or they’ll realise that it’s really simple to install a few extra CPAN modules and do that. I hope many of them take the second option.