no one knows!

So many people use Perl for so many web projects, but only very few people actually show or tell it.

We (the Padre IRC channel) shortly discovered that there are plenty more or less “official” icons and buttons for showing this to the world:

The Perl foundation (TPF) gives us

and  

And O’Reilly licensed some camels for free usage:

and    and   and  

(and some others)

All of them have their licenses but as a summary one could say that you could put them on your website if you

• Run a non-commercial project (most but not all are also approved for commercial projects)
• and make the graphic a link to http://www.perl.org (Perl foundation buttons)  or http://www.perl.com (O’Reilly buttons)

Please follow the links above and read the full license before using them.

Gabor Szabo colltected some Powered-by-Perl icons here but I don’t know about the sources an licensing. You might violate TPF, O’Reilly or others rights when using them, so add them on your own risk.

I like this one . If you got any rights on it, please tell be and I’ll remove it.

Why should you promote Perl?

Why are you using Perl?

It’s a great language but too few people are using it.

(Nearly) every PHP project is using “.php” – URLs which tell people: This (maybe great) site is running PHP!

But Perl based sites? They use mod_perl (which has no file extension by default) or CGI-scripts (which aren’t recognized as Perl scripts).

It would be great if you’ld add one of the buttons to your Perl projects. If you don’t want it on every page, simply add it to the about, imprint or contact page.

If you’re not allowed to add a button (maybe it’s not your project but you’re managing it), you might be allowed to add it to the Perl Foundation list of Perl users – it’s free and it’s free advertising for your company or project.

You don’t have any Perl based website?

But you might know someone who runs a Perl based project or website! Tell him (or her) to add a button or point her/him to this blog post.

Talking to Gabor during CeBit made me trying to start a new Hannover.pm, a Hannover Perl Mongers Group.

Anybody interested is invited to join the Mailinglist or visit the Hannover.pm homepage.

Look at it on CPAN or grab and perldoc it

We were talking to many PHP guys on CeBit 2010. I tried showing the huge power of Perl but – as far as I remember – I never said anybody “forget PHP”. Here are the most important items (odered by usual order of appereance):

1. You don’t need to learn Perl

Neither PHP not Perl people like that fact, but PHP was originally based on Perl. There are still many similarities between both considering keywords and syntax. But most PHP people agree if you say: “If you know PHP, you basically know a good amount of Perl.”

2. CPAN

There are about 20.000 modules for all kinds of things on CPAN, like database access, file parsing, templating and math and all of them are free. All CPAN modules could be installed by a CPAN client which usually comes with your Perl.

Please tell me if you know any other language which has something comparable.

3. DBIx::Class

Most of the PHP users also use MySQL but for the full time of CeBit 2010, I met only one person (who actually was a database expert with some PHP knowledge) who answered the question “Do you like to write SQL statements, expecially SELECT JOINs over some tables?” with yes, all others answered between “no”, “not really” and “less than writing PHP”.

Basically DBIx::Class abstracts the SQL statement layer: Your source dosn’t need to contain one SQL statement any longer. The results are:

• No need to SELECT JOIN, just point DBIx::Class to some property of the table row you need, maybe using a referenced table in just one line of source.
• Once you got your object, you could use all referenced tables as simple childs. Sample: $user->customer->company gets the company name out of the customer table starting from the user table pointing to the customer table.
• DBIx::Class reduces database load by fetchting the object when it’s first actually used, not at the time the object is created.
• DBIx::Class makes SQL injection impossible because it’s encapsulated by DBIx::Class without any additional development.
• Reduces development time of database actions by about 50% compared to writing SQL statements (depending on the developer, of course)

Nothing written above has anything to do with comparing PHP and Perl. It’s just comparing DBIx::Class to $dbh->select… (or other ways sending SQL statements in other languages). There is something on PHP which might be compareable to DBIx::Class even (up to me) it isn’t nearly as powerful as DBIx::Class, but most PHP – people I met on CeBit 2010 were still writing plain SQL statements – as I did about eight month ago.

Also remember that using DBIx::Class will introduce a slight part of OOP even to people who don’t actually use it. Up to me this would be the preferred way of starting OOP development because it’s a slow start – you could add more and more OOP as time goes by and you feel ready to look into another world.

4. Catalyst and Template::Toolkit

There are technologies for PHP which are really better in many situations than these two. Catalyst is a complete Web framework which reduces the typical programming amount for weblications and Template::Toolkit (TT) provides a very powerful template engine, but I was working together with some webdesigners in the past which can’t handle it because it was too programmish.

If you pass a DBIx::Class object to TT, the one writing the HTML code could easily access all data of the table row including any child objects and any future changes to the table structure without any additional application source.

5. Coming back to CPAN

I wrote about three examples of the more than 20.000 CPAN modules, but if you ask people what else do they want to do and live-search for it on CPAN, it usually gives you some results. Please recheck this if/when the CPAN search engine (which shows modules even on very slow relations to the search) is being fixed.

Good samples to show are

• Parse::CSV for parsing CSV files in two minutes development time instead of ten
• Creating or modifiing PDF files
• Accessing external things like network servers of any kind

6. How to start

Padre, the free Perl IDE comes with some few lessons within the examples, not enough for really learning Perl but good for looking into the syntax.

The next step would be http://learn.perl.org for many more resources how to learn Perl.

If you want to meet the community, look at the PerlMongers groups who meet maybe also in your area.

If you don’t even want to look at Perl…

…you should at least try Padre which also has a PHP plugin for working on PHP files. You’re welcome to improve it by testing or changing the source.

Last notice: Writing Padre Plugins in PHP should theoretically be possible using the Parrot engine, if you want to try it, please add your experiences to the Padre Trac wiki.

Facts about CeBit 2010:

• 334.000 visitors
• 4.157 exhibitors from 68 countries
• 3% more visitors per day (until friday)
• 80% business visitors (until friday)

(source: http://www.cebit.de)

The first two days were the most successful ones in terms of business contacts and interest in Perl.

Wednesday to friday also went good on contacts even if the amount of private visitors increased a little bit each day.

Saturday was mostly private day, many young people came to our booth and asked about Perl.

We planned to…

…introduce Perl to the companies we may meet there. Three special project days were planned for Padre, Foswiki and OTRS where people of these projects planned to be at the booth. We also had beermats of DBIx::Class, Moose and Catalyst, some Tuits and many many marketing papers for distribution.

We failed on…

…bringing Perl into the companies because we learned that most companies already use Perl; for many applications like

• basic network management
• oneliners for quick testing
• data conversion
• preprocessing high volume print job data
• many things in banking business
• telecommunication and internet processing
• health data processing and analysis

If I’d write down the company names for each sample, you’d be as surprised as we were, but most people visiting us were developers or IT managers and they’re usually not allowed to give us permission to write that their company uses Perl.

Some few companies refused to be published at all for security reasons and I will respect this, but the other Perl::Staff people and I are in contact with the people we meet and I hope that we’ll be able to publish the first company names with official approval during the next week.

We learned…

…many things including that we brought something for every visitor to our booth:

• Developers currently using (Visual) Basic, PHP or Phyton were mostly interested to hear about Perl and Padre
• Java, C++ and C developers usually liked the idea that Perl could easily test their programs because most of them didn’t do any automated tests at all
• All the OOP people (Java, C++ and others) were really impressed about Moose
• Everybody using SQL statements wondered how much DBIx::Class could speed up their development
• Most developers found Padre interesting (except of one guy using the Progress language which currently isn’t supported)
• Businessmen not developing themself were impressed that Foswiki is able to limit read and/or write access to documents to users or groups and could be used for employees, the public homepage and printing brochures and manual books without maintaining three individual copies of the same document
• A women leading the account department of her company confirmed heavily that customers like to write mails to the wrong department, ask the same things multiple times each day and love to write question mails without and required information. We “sold” her OTRS which manages incoming requests, has groups, allows tracing of who-did-what-and-when and simple forwarding of requests to the correct group while terms of open source “sold” stands for “promised to download and try it”
• It’s easier to actually run a booth even on such a big event like CeBit than we expected, but
• it’s much more tiering to run a booth on such a big event like CeBit than we expected.

It was really nice…

to meet szabgab, reneeb, getty and the other Perl::Staff people in reality.

Szabgab and I had interesting discussions in the evening, some new ideas were born and I learned many things about Perl, the Perl community and Perl-related tools on the net.

Getty donated some Vodka to Hessen (actually to their booth people) and also enjoyed the other after-CeBit-parties (I think).

Final results and thanks

We talked to some of the people from other projects and Britta from Linux New Media while packing our things together on Saturday evening and most of them (including us) said that Perl was “the winner” of this event. I think we were one of the projects getting the most visiters within the Open Source Lounge, learned very much about running a booth and Perl usage.

Very big thanks go to Andreas “ads”, the Postgres guy, he told us about the OpenSource Lounge and how to get there.

Also thanks to reneeb and szabgab for organizing everything and Britta from Linux New Media for inviting us and arranging an unplanned lighting talk for szabgab.

Currently, we all would like to meet again on CeBit 2011…

Die Realität sieht so aus, dass das gesamte Perl::Staff – Team @ CeBit Abends einfach nur fertig ist

Wir hatten sehr sehr viele interessante Gespräche und mussten feststellen, das unser Plan, Firmen für Perl zu begeistern, in den allermeisten Fällen undurchführbar ist – weil fast jede Firma es bereits nutzt.

Wir haben von vielen interessanten Applikationen erfahren, wurden aber in aller Regel gebeten, keine Firmennamen oder Anwendungsdetails zu veröffentlichen, bevor die entsprechen Marketingabteilungen der Firmen ihr OK gegeben haben.

Hier vorab eine kleine Liste von Branchen, in denen Perl teilweise sogar sehr weitreichend engesetzt wird:

• Banken
• Telekommunikation (SMS, Datenaufbereitung, Datenbankkopplung)
• ISPs
• Consulting
• Wetterdatenaufbereitung

Morgen ist der letzte CeBit-Tag und das ist einerseits schade, denn es macht viel Spaß mit den Leuten über Perl zu reden und andererseits gut, weil die Energie und Konzentration jeden Tag nachlässt – bei allem Spaß ist es auch ein ziemlicher Stress.

Als CeBit Fazit kann man bereits jetzt sagen, das ich nicht annähernd mit diesem Erfolg gerechnet hätte. Wir haben fast durchgehend Leute auf dem Stand, sehr sehr viele kannten Perl bereits und fast allen konnten wir Perl nahebringen oder zumindest einige neue Informationen und Arbeitserleichterungen vermitteln. Zudem haben wir viele sehr interessante Kontakte knüpfen können, die nächste Woche nachbearbeitet und gepflegt werden müssen.

Was erwartet Besucher am Padre / Perl – Stand?

• Padre – Entwickler und Perl – Experten treffen
• In Perl geschriebene Spiele mit der Möglichkeit, diese nach Bedarf abzuwandeln
• Präsentationen von Foswiki, OTRS und anderen Perl – Projekten
• Viel Informationsmaterial rund um Perl

Perl und Padre sind in der Open Source Lounge in Halle 2, Stand F34.

Die Perl Foundation zeigt dabei stellvertretend für alle Perl Projekte Padre, Foswiki und OTRS.

Das Linux-Magazin stellt Perl in seiner CeBit – Sonderausgabe kurz vor.

The Padre IRC channel window was next to his IM window when he told me and I was thinking about Padre support.

The Padre support channel (called #Padre on irc.perl.org) is open 24/7, and there are about 45 people and one or two bots around, but at least some of them are always alive and ready to answer questions.

There are two facts that gave us this high reachability (I think):

1. Our developers are all around the world

Some Australians are really pushing Padre, including Alias who did 16% of the core code and waxhead, our current release manager. We got some few US guys and a strong European and Middle Eastern group. Most of them are online and usually happy to help users when they’re at their desks.

2. Padre is a working tool

This is true for many open source things, but Padre is something you use everyday and – compared to tools like “less” or “traceroute” – you recognize it. Many people use Padre for working, it’s always visible while it’s being used – compared to Apache or syslogd that are hidden if they’re working probably.

Some people using Padre also open their IRC client or the Mibbit web-based IRC client for joining the Padre support, asking  questions and answering others.

Give us a try

Padre is a complex IDE. If you try it out, you’ll likely have questions or maybe even problems. Feel free to come to our support channel and ask your question. It might take some minutes or even half an hour until someone replies – as many people are busy with work – but I guess you’ll get your answer. And you’re welcome to stay there and spend a minute on answering a question of someone else.

Peter (waxhead), der Release-Manager schreibt dazu ausführlich in seinem Blog. Die Liste der Änderungen dieser Version ist so umfangreich geworden wie schon lange nicht mehr.

Die meisten Änderungen dieser Version kommen von Adam Kennedy und Ahmad M. Zawawi, aber wir konnten auch wieder einige Neuzugänge im Padre-Entwickerteam verzeichnen, die mehr oder weniger kleine Änderungen beigetragen haben.

Wie immer ist Padre über CPAN oder via http://padre.perlide.org/download.html kostenlos verfügbar.