I attended YAPC::NA 2008 (Yet another Perl Conference, North America, 2008) from June 16--18, 2008. It was held at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. YAPCs are inexpensive---the conference was $85, lodging in the dorms was $60/night.

Terminology

Rakudo is the new name for the Perl 6 compiler targeting the Parrot virtual machine.

Perl 6 is a new language designed from the ground up. It is similar to Perl 5 but it has many improvements: extensibility at the syntax and semantic levels, object oriented programming features, regular expressions, smart-match operator, syntax cleanup, etc.

Parrot is a virtual machine for dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Tcl, etc. It compiles and executes bytecode, but is also designed to act as an interpreter.

Answers for people

Before I left people asked me to look into the following topics. Here is wht I found out:

backups

no information

hands-on Perl training

waiting for a book in the mail

Moose

Moose has been in production for two years. It's solid and highly recommended by many people.

Changes I plan to make from learning new things at the conference

Use Perl 5.10 where possible.

Use Moose for programs where using objects makes sense.

Idea from conversation with Joshua Gatcomb (aka Limbic~Region): consider using Parse::Yapp instead of Parse::RecDescent for complicated parsers in future.

These are some of the more interesting talks I attended

TPF Annual Report
Jim Brandt
bio abstract slides
The Perl Foundation has received a $200,000 grant plus several much smaller grants. Rakudo is progressing nicely.

Forget shell scripts
Mike Schilli
bio abstract slides
Use Perl instead of shell scripts for better reusability and maintainability.

Essential One-liners
Walt Mankowski
bio abstract slides
Using these handy Perl one-liner tips can make one more efficient and effective.

DBI-Link 3.0
David Fetter
bio abstract slides
Gives one SQL access to external tabular data from comma separated values, DB2, Excel, Google, MySQL, nmap data, Oracle, PostgreSQL, ps listings, etc.

Email Hates the Living!
Ricardo Signes
bio abstract (no slides on web?)
Email headers are improperly implemented because the specifications aren't rigorous and are internally inconsistent.

PAR + FUSE + PDF
Chris Dolan
bio abstract slides
Fuse is combination of Linux kernel module and user space library which enables one to write user-space filesystems. This module enables you to write filesystems using Perl. PAR = Perl Archive Toolkit + FUSE Filesytem in User Space + PDF Portable Document Format

Perl XML Binding Framework
Maxim Grigoriev
(no bio on web?) abstract slides
Convert XML to Perl objects and back.

WSS - WebService Specification Schema and LL libraries
Yusuke Kawasaki
bio abstract slides
Write a single language-independent WebService Specification Schema based on YAML and the WebService Specification Schema tool converts it to Perl, PHP, HTML, etc.

Introduction to the Solstice Framework
Patrick A. Michaud
bio abstract web site
The Solstice framework is a development framework for Perl developed at the University of Washington.

Moose - A post modern object system for Perl 5
Stevan Little
bio abstract web site
Moose is a set of Perl 5 modules that provide the semantics of the Perl 6 object system to Perl 5 programs. They do not use the Perl 6 syntax. Moose makes Perl 5 Object Oriented programming easier, more consistent and less tedious.

Rakudo Perl - Perl 6 on Parrot
Dr. Patrick Michaud
bio abstract slides
Rakudo is proceeding nicely.

How to create a simple web application with Web::App, Template::Toolkit, and Class::DBI
Leonard Miller
bio abstract slides
If you can't (because you don't have admin permissions needed) or don't want to use Catalyst (because it is big and scary) consider using this ``lite'' MVC (Model = database model, View = HTML pages, Controller = code to glue model and view together) code.

Leveraging Bricolage for Content Management across Web, Intranet and Print
Matthew Rolf
bio abstract (no slides on web?)
How Dennison College uses the Bricolage Content Management System.

Perl and JavaScript, Sitting in a Tree
Ingy döt Net
bio abstract (no slides on web?)
Ingy has ported jQuery to Perl and named it pQuery.

Buildbot and Smolder - distributed build and testing
Michael Peters
bio abstract (no slides on web?)
Buildbot builds and tests software. Smolder produces nicely formatted reports from buildbot output.

DBIx::MasterClass
Matt Trout
bio abstract slides
Frequently Delivered Answers regarding DBIx::Class, an extensible and flexible object <-> relational database mapper.

Reaction::web MVC
Matt Trout
bio abstract slides
An application platform for perl MVC web development based on user-interface elements. This is very new---don't use for production.

Gluing Together Amazon Web Services with Perl
Timothy Appnel
bio abstract slides
How to use amazon.com's $0.10/GB in, $0.17/GB out, $0.10/hour elastic compute cloud. See Amazon EC2 for more information. (3Tera has a similar utiity computing system.)

Why WebGUI?
JT Smith
bio abstract web site
WebGUI is a content application framework, which allows for easy content management, while maintaining the ability to create and install custom applications.

ChemChains sandbox: Modeling cell biology in a boolean network
Jay Hannah
bio abstract slides
Modeling cell biology in boolean networks is difficult because the networks are so complicated.

Industry Strength Perl Best Practices
Gabor Szabo
bio abstract (no slides on web?)
How corporations implement Perl Best Practices.

Testing with Math::Combinatorics
Avirvan Chatterjee
bio abstract slides
Math::Combinatorics can help users exhaustively test various combinations and permutations of input.

Closing Keynote: Do you Belive in the Users?
Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
Fitzpatrick bio Collins-Sussman bio abstract (no slides on web?)
Keep users in mind when writing programs.

Revised: July 28, 2008
Created: June 21, 2008