Perl Conference
These are the talks, tutorials and papers I've presented at the Perl Conference over the years. Click on the titles below to see HTML versions of the talks.
This paper addresses some of the issues involved in developing and maintaining web site content and web-based applications. It identifies some common problems encountered and presents some basic requirements for flexible content generation. It demonstrates the technique of using text-based template files to generate dynamic HTML and introduces the Template Toolkit, a set of Perl modules available from CPAN ideally suited for this purpose.
This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a tool written in Perl to assist in the design and construction of high performance power kites. It introduces the sport of traction kiting and describes the desired features of the kites used. It highlights the need for and requirements of such a tool, in particular emphasising a level of adaptability which will allow considerable experimentation and reworking of the kite design. It demonstrates an approach which uses Perl's flexibility to easily build complex models of the 3D information representing a kite from relatively simple parametric algorithms. It shows how the Template Toolkit is used to present the resultant data model in different formats for 3D visualisation via the POV-Ray ray tracing program, and for generating 2D cutting plans as PostScript files.
This paper describes an ongoing Open Source project to design and develop a generic, configurable, extensible, scalable and above all useful architecture for a document, information and application server framework, written in and for Perl. It discusses the rationale for building such a system and draws inspiration from the various other application servers and related software components currently available. It attempts to identify a common architecture that might permit closer integration of these different systems and lead to a convergence of features. It presents Camelot, a prototype implementation of an extensible application server framework, and describes the design philosophy and general architecture underlying it. In particular, that is to encourage a clear separation of concerns between data, application logic and presentation components, thereby promoting modularity, re-usability and ease of customisation of content delivery services and other server bound applications.