Perl Conference 2.0
Field notes from the O'Reilly Perl conference
9/14/98
by Edward Piou
Recently, Perl developers and users congregated for the Perl Conference 2.0, a technical conference covering the language some have called the "duct tape of the Internet." The conference took place August 17-20 in San Jose, California (the next Perl conference will be August 21-24, 1999 in Monterey California).
In addition to giving a concentrated dose of Perl theory and application over the space of a few days, the gathering provided an opportunity for members of the far-flung "Republic of Perl" to mingle, trade ideas, and discuss where the future of the language lies.
In a keynote speech sprinkled with wide-ranging cultural references (including the Lord of the Rings, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and the spread of Christianity) Larry Wall, creator of the Perl language, likened the Republic of Perl to an onion. With himself at the center as creator, Wall described the Onion as radiating outwards in a number of layers. Surrounding the center are the "inner ringers," people who were early adopters of the language, and have made major contributions (such as working on the development of the core language itself, writing books to bring others into the Onion, or writing some of the more popular Perl modules). Farther out are the "outer ringers"—those who came along later, and use Perl in their everyday lives or jobs. In between are the people who are neither inner nor outer ringers—people who have perhaps released bits of code for others to use, but have not devoted as much time to developing the language itself. In this report, I'll try to give you an idea of the pieces of the Onion I saw at the conference.
The Inner Ring: Tutorials and Classes
Perl Conference 2.0 started with two days of half- and full-day tutorials on a variety of topics, from "Windows NT System Administration with Perl" to "Cool Tricks with Apache and Perl." I attended a set of two tutorials give by Mark-Jason Dominus on Web security. The tutorials were full of useful information on the security holes which you open up when you start running interactive programs on your web server.
He gave several specific examples of how a cracker might exploit server programs that don't launder user input sufficiently or might use a custom-made browser (written, perhaps, with Perl's libwww library) to get around lax security in poorly-written web server applications. These examples, plus his comments on the theories of security, had me going back over many of my own programs looking for loopholes. Two hints for those who didn't attend:
The various classes, while not quite as information-dense as the tutorials, presented some good hints and theories on dealing with problems programmers might face. Andreas Koenig gave an interesting talk on a web publishing system he set up at his company, which eases the process of previewing, link-checking, and publishing web documents. One of Tom Christiansen's talks, on "Perl Style," was full of hints (mostly useful for beginners) on how to make code more efficient and more easily readable. In a more theoretical vein, Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML specs, talked about how he expects XML to improve the state of inter-computer communication (as well as programmer-to-computer communication) through simplification and standardization of the "language" these entities speak.
The Apache Town Meeting at the end of the last day of the conference was disappointing. Only a handful of people showed up, and those that did had few questions. But I should have expected this—the Perl Town Meeting (with many of the famous and interesting Perl inner ringers as panelists) occurred at the same time.
During the Apache Town Meeting, one interesting question that was asked was whether the Apache people (the Native American nation) objected to the naming of a freeware web server after them. The panelists (who were members of The Apache Group) stated that some individuals, none of whom claimed to be representatives of the Apaches, had written to them with concerns about their use of the name. They went on to say that while the official story of how Apache got its name (from being a "patch-y" server) is essentially correct, most of the members of the group agreed to the name Apache because they admired the image of the Apache people, a proud people living off the land and building a vibrant culture with little environmental waste or inefficiency.
While a dedicated student could learn all the material presented in the tutorials and classes on his or her own, I would guess that most participants found the transfer of knowledge to be more efficient, and a bit more enjoyable, in a conference setting. For those who didn't attend, O'Reilly has made notes from many of the talks available online.
The Outer Ring: Perl People
The conference wasn't terribly diverse in terms of ethnicity or gender (though there was a higher percentage of women than the first year), but attendees did vary widely in industry backgrounds and "geek-ness." Looking at name tags and talking to people, you could find system administrators from stock market brokerages, programmers from government agencies, freelance consultants, and web developers from major web agencies. People I talked to indicated that Perl (and other "open source" or free software) was accepted in their organizations. Across industries, corporations have opened their eyes to the benefits of free tools, and have given the go-ahead (and money, in the form of conference fees) to use them. Of course, as Tim O'Reilly said in one of his speeches at the conference, many of these companies were already using freeware before the "suits" gave it their go-ahead. The suits just didn't know it.
I mention the "geek" factor because some might expect a conference like this to be full of socially maladjusted programmers who don't know how to deal with other human beings except from behind a computer screen. Given that the keynote speech contained numerous J.R.R. Tolkien references, and the first night's film festival consisted of Planet of the Apes and old episodes of Red Dwarf, it's not too hard to see there is a core Perl programming culture that possesses more of the geek factor than, say, mainstream society. But if you're avoiding technical conferences like this for fear there won't be anybody you can relate to, stop worrying. With the continuing acceptance of the language, it's no longer just a hard-core programming crowd (or a hard-core science fiction audience) that shows up. As long as your familiarity with the language covers Learning Perl, you'll be able to relate to your fellow attendees and probably understand the speakers.
Other Parts of the Onion: Technical Papers
One set of talks consisted of technical papers describing Perl-related applications or theories which users had been working on for the past year. 18 papers (out of 48 submitted) were chosen for presentation at the conference. Six of those papers won a $1000 prize each. Below is a list of the six winners with a brief description of each. URLs link to the authors' pages, but the papers are also available at the Perl Conference site.
Best Software Development Tool
When the STL Isn't Enough: Adding Perl to Your C++ Applications
by Ken Fox
Reference URL: http://www.msen.com/~fox/
This paper describes libperl++, a programming library that helps simplify the
task of using Perl code in C++ applications. C++ and Perl each have their
advantages as a programming language. By using both, you can accomplish more
than you could with just one.
Best New Module
LWPng: Adding HTTP1.1
by Gisle Aas
Reference URL: http://www.linpro.no/lwp/lwpng-pa
er/
This paper discusses the addition of support for HTTP/1.1 (instead of just
1.0) to libwww-perl, a collection of Perl modules that provides a basis for
building web clients (both robots and browsers). It includes support for
multiple persistent (simultaneous) connections.
Best System Administration Tool
System Performance Database: System Information Gathering
and Display
by Marty D. Cudmore and Richard Jetton
Reference URL: http://www.cudmore.net/PerlCon
erence2.0
This paper talks about the development of System Performance Database (SPD), a
framework for gathering system data, storing it in a database, and serving
that information to administrators in an understandable format.
Best Web Application Tool
Distributed HTTP
by Jon Udell
Reference URL: http://udell.roninhouse.
om/download/dhttp.zip
This paper describes a project in which the author developed a system of web
servers (entirely written in Perl) designed to run on ordinary users'
computers for the purpose of creating a peer-to-peer, instead of
client-server, network. As a result, people not connected to the Net were able
to gather information or perform calculations locally, then distribute their
information to a network of small local web servers that need to share
information.
Best End-User Application
An Internet Banking Framework
by Javier Rodr’guez and Carlos de la Guardia
Reference URL: http://www.aldea.com.mx/papers/
anking/
This paper describes a project in which the authors developed a system,
through a series of modules, to allow communication between a large bank's
legacy computing systems and Internet-connected computers that could serve
customers online.
Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility
Declarative Command-Line Interfaces
by Damian Conway
Reference URL: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~d
mian/
This paper deals with a new approach to command-line argument parsers for
Perl. The package described allows the programmer to specify the usage string
for each argument which is entered.
Recap
The Perl Conference was a great opportunity to learn some new tricks I can apply in my own programming and system-building. It was also a chance to meet the people who've written a lot of the software I use in my own work. If you're looking for a fairly technical conference full of theory and code snippets to help you get your Perl programming jobs done, you should consider attending next year. While there were some job boards at the conference, and the Perl Mongers (a group dedicated to supporting local groups of Perl programmers) was out in force, I would not call this a networking conference. In the Perl community, after all, successful networking consists not so much of who you have met face to face— it's more about what you've provided (in the way of code and support) to the community.
Edward Piou is an Anchor producer and runs ep Productions, a Washington, D.C.-based development company.
© 1998-1999 Anchor Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.