Jay Kuri: April 2009 Archives

We here at Catalyzed.org know that Perl is alive and well, but it can be hard to tell that if you don't know where to look. 

Recognizing this fact, the Enlightened Perl Organization is sponsoring a new blogging initiative.  The purpose is to raise awareness of Perl by promoting Perl on sites that are outside the old guard of Perl forums and sites. 

The folks at Catalyzed are very excited about this initiative and want to help in any way we can.  As such, we are offering an author account to anyone who wants to take part in the Ironman challenge.  Contact us at ideas at catalyzed.org or on #catalyzed on irc.perl.org if you want to take advantage.

Also we will soon be adding a Perl community page. If you have your own Blog site and you cover Perl topics, drop us a line to be added.

Over the past weekend, a new version of the Catalyst web framework was released.  Catalyst 5.8 is a significant step in the development of Catalyst and while it changes a significant portion of Catalyst's internals, it retains backward compatibility with applications built on previous versions of Catalyst.  With a framework as complex as Catalyst, this is no small feat.  Tomas Doran, a major contributor to the 5.8 update, is with us today to tell us more about this major milestone in Catalyst's development.

MojoMojo is probably the most powerful and flexible open-source wiki application available today. Based on Catalyst and Perl, MojoMojo is gaining momentum and notoriety for it's flexibility and modern web-application features. Today we get the opportunity to speak with Marcus Ramberg, the creator of MojoMojo.

I first started working on mojomojo as a project to learn the new MVC framework Maypole. This was back in 2005, and as it became apparent that the Maypole project wasn't going anywhere, I ported MojoMojo over to Catalyst. I remember the transition as being fairly easy. Back then we were also using the Class-DBI ORM. MojoMojo has long since been ported over to DBIx-Class. This happened at the Hackathon connected to YAPC::NA in Chicago.

 

Welcome to Catalyzed.org.  A site dedicated to sharing with the world what modern Perl looks like, and providing a peek into what's going on in the Perl community.  

As you are no-doubt aware, Perl does not have a flattering reputation. People have called it everything from 'ugly line noise' and 'unmaintainable' to the big favorite: simply 'dead.'   Perl is alive and well, but to those not in the Perl community it can be hard to see that.   

So the question is... If Perl is so lively, how do you reconcile that with it's reputation? How did we get here? And more importantly, how do we make Perl's reputation reflect what we who use it know, namely:

Perl is one of the most powerful and fun languages available with a lively and active community.

Today, we'll take a short stroll down memory lane, to see where this reputation comes from, and catch a glimpse of what modern Perl looks like.