The Programming Republic of Perl
The O'Reilly Perl Conference August 1997
O'Reilly owns perl now.
Okay, they don't really, but they own Larry Wall, or at least pay him to come to their office and develop Perl.
Perl is and presumably shall remain to be free.
http://www.perl.com is now at O'Reilly, they have re-done the page and are re-working some of the interaction, but it will basically be the source for Perl information from O'Reilly.
As stated in ftp://info.cert.org/pub/cert_advisories/CA-97.17.sperl there are buffer overflow problems in any version of Perl earlier than 5.004. It was reccommended several times that programs only use that version of Perl, ESPECIALLY when used with CGI scripts, since that is basically a hole open for someone to gain root access.
Larry told Bible stories and played funny sounds out of his computer.
Basically Tim O'Reilly and somewhat Larry introduced the not-so-hidden theme of the conference which was about how to keep and maintain the concept of freeware in an commercial software market, and, of course, how Perl and O'Reilly fit into that.
In the beginning keynote Larry basically talked about how Perl came about and where he wanted it to go and somewhat how it fit into everything else in the world, illustrated with Bible stories and funny sounds.
Tom ran over some of the changes from Perl4 and Perl5 and threw in a dig at Randal Scwartz.
Although he covered the basic differences in theings with Perl5, he mostly pointed out that there were 180 man pages that came with Perl now, so basically Perl is now documented.
The following were the reccommended reading:
perldelta - changes between perl5.003 and perl5.004
perldiag - perl diagnostics
perlfaq(1-9)
(Look at /usr/local/man/man1/perl* on mothra for the things you can get.)
In the middle of explaining some feature of Perl, Tom said, "Is Randall in the room?!?" and Randal Scwartz replied "Yeah. Yeah, I see it, I see it."
Randal ran over how Perl is and isn't secure, Felix ran over his Penguin module.
Randal pointed out that as of version Perl 5.004, Perl does not have buffer overflows that can be used to get root access.
He also encouraged the use of taint checking on all CGI scripts and any other scripts that have user interaction, and covered the intricacies of tainting.
Felix talked about Penguin, his program to share Perl programs across networks. It basically allows people on other systems to run some programs on your system.
Doug talked about the mod_perl Apache module.
Basically, the mod_perl module in Apache creates a system where Apache is running a perl interpreter that all it's children servers can use so that it takes less memory than all the children having to load the interpreter each time a program is run.
Jon talked about things that the MIT Media Lab did with Perl.
Jon showed some really, really strange things like guys who wear video helmets 24/7 and allow you to constantly see what they are seeing. Also talked about various things like newspapers that will pick out what topics you want to read.
Larry Wall played violin in some enthno-new age band while Randal Schwartz drank beer and ate pizza (along with everyone else).
Andrew Schulman showed how the Web was becoming the command line of the future.
Andrew talked about the change in the concept of what computers can do because of the web. Specifically how some companies that make operating systems and GUI word processors have said that it would be impossible to be doing things that the web is now doing, so programmers are now having a whole new way of doing things open to them.
A large part of time was spent on how complex URLs can be used to cause programs to run on another machine and produce large ranges of data. (e.g. http://www.zip2.com/scripts/map.dll?type=jdir&sType=street& dType=street&dType=street&dstreet=103+MORRIS+ST&dcity=SEBASTOPOL& dstate=CA&streetaddr=N+1st+St&userid=1184558&userpw=xtv0J_txAwt8t E_FD0C&version=91450&java=no&sType=street&streetaddr=1st+st.& cit y=san+jose&state=CA&ccity=SEBASTOPOL&cstate=CA&ck=3599047&adrVer= 872139786&ver=d3.0 )
His talk is at:http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/perl/talk/webapi1.html
Not so much a list of essential perl modules as a talk about how modules are created and put into the perl module archive.
Clay Irving has created a Perl Reference web page that keeps up to date on web references for Perl. He also has created a modules references web page and that is what he spoke abote.
Nate Patwardhan created the module package and documentation for Perl in a Nutshell and the Perl Resource Kit. He talked about the Perl module namespace and how to go about creating or using a module.
Tim Bunce ran over his DBI module.
Tim created a perl module called DBI or DataBase Interface, basically this is a module that creates a united interface for many different SQL (and soon non-SQL) databases. Behind the interface are various drivers that convert the DBI interaction into the correct format for that database and converts the output from the database into the DBI standard.
This allows a user to switch databases being used with only minimal changes needed in database interaction scripts. For example, a company switched its databases from mSQL to Oracle, and the code changes took 4 lines.
Jeffrey Friedl did a quick overview of the stuff in his book.
Jeffrey Friedl wrote "Mastering Regular Expressions" and basically covered the simpler things of what was in the book in this session. He focused mostly on how the regex engine went about doing searches so that it was easier to understand things like precedences and what is going on in greedy and non-greedy searches.
Eric Raymond gave a talk about how the freeware method of software creation would overrun the commercial method of software creation.
Eric basically showed how things like Linux, Apache, Perl, etc have been popping up and becoming the largest used product of their type, not merely because they are free, but because they are the stablest products as well. He basically talked about the systems of freeware development that worked.
Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache Project, and Eric and Larry Wall, Tim Bunce, Malcom Beattie, Tim O'Reilly and Chip Salzenberg all talked about how Perl and Apache came about as freeware development and how it would continue in the software marketplace.
Tim O'Reilly also covered how Perl would be now handled by O'Reilly & Assoc. as a package that Larry Wall would still develop and they would provide support for.