Perl.com update -------------------------------------- The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers
=========================================================== Sponsored by VeriSign - The Value of Trust Is your e-business secure enough? Learn why it's vital to encrypt your business transactions, secure your intranets, and authenticate your Web site with the strongest encryption available-128-bit SSL. To learn more, get VeriSign's FREE Guide, "Securing Your Web Site for Business" now: http://www.verisign.com/cgi-bin/go.cgi?a=n203763060014000 =========================================================== Hello, world! This is Simon Cozens, managing editor of www.perl.com, here to bring you the week's news and developments both in the Perl world and on our own site. * Perl at large. I've long argued that POE is one of the most interesting and useful Perl modules around; unfortunately, I've also conceded that it's one of the most difficult to understand. Thankfully, Matt Cashner is working on solving that, and has come up with POEd - the POE documentation project. It's still in its early stages, but worth checking out: http://eekeek.org/poed Matt Sergeant, Perl's de facto XML God, has produced something which should make other XML acolytes whoop with delight: XML::SAX is a parser-independent interface to SAX, and contains a pure-Perl SAX parser. Robin Berjon is working on an Expat back-end to it, and Matt is also planning on a LibXML version. But thankfully, the whole point of XML::SAX is that you don't need to worry about what's going on under the hood. (Think AnyDBM.) This is a huge shot in the arm for Perl's XML support; nice one, Matt. http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=XML-SAX And finally, this week I'm on the road again - after an enjoyable weekend talking about Parrot, art, and many other things with the crowd at BSD Con Europe, I'm currently in Boston getting ready for the Lightweight Languages conference at MIT. This is an opportunity for people from the academic community to get together with some of the lead developers of Python, Perl, Tcl and the like, and to discuss the future of dynamic languages. Dan Sugalski and I will, naturally, be there plugging Parrot, but it'll be a lot of fun to meet up with our opposite numbers in the other leading languages. http://ll1.mit.edu/ http://www.bsdconeurope.org/ * What's new on perl.com Last week, I said we'd be bringing you articles about the interface between Perl and bioinformatics; we kick off with an article from the author of O'Reilly's new book, "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics." James Tisdall explains how he uses Perl to parse and manipulate the data from the Dictionary of Protein Sites and Patterns, along with some discussion of why Perl is the ideal language for biochemists. http://perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/16/perlbio2.html "Web services" is a big buzzphrase around O'Reilly and around the rest of the Net these days, especially with Microsoft's .NET vision. But what does it mean? Put simply, it's computers using the web to talk to other computers instead of talking to people. For instance, one of the coolest web services I've seen is O'Reilly's own Meerkat service, created by Rael Dornfest. This takes feeds from a whole host of IT news sites, and turns them into an integrated news ticker. The technology behind this is RSS, the Remote Site Summary XML schema. Chris Ball shows us how to get started with RSS, by turning an external news site into an RSS feed using the XML::RSS Perl module. http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/15/creatingrss.html http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/ Enjoy, SC ============================================================= Sponsored by Macromedia FREE TRIAL: DEVELOP AND DEPLOY J2EE COMPATIBLE APPLICATIONS QUICKLY! Macromedia JRun 3.1 - with speed, ease-of-use, scalability, and high performance - empowers you to build powerful J2EE compatible Java applications with Java Servlets, JSP, and EJBs. TRY JRUN FOR FREE at: http://www.oreillynet.com/nlr/10/macromedia/jrun ============================================================= *** Featured Articles *** Parsing Protein Domains with Perl James Tisdall, author of O'Reilly's Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics, shows biologists how to program in Perl using biological data, with downloadable code examples. http://perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/16/perlbio2.html *** Creating RSS Chris Ball shows us how to turn any ordinary news site into a Remote Site Summary web service. http://perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/15/creatingrss.html *** XML::LibXML - An XML::Parser Alternative Kip Hampton discusses XML::LibXML, a capable, updated alternative to Perl's venerable and venerated XML::Parser. http://xml.com/pub/a/2001/11/14/xml-libxml.html *** Object-Oriented Perl How do you move from an intermediate Perl programmer to an expert? Understanding object-oriented Perl is one key step along the way. http://perl.com/pub/a/2001/11/07/ooperl.html ========================================================== O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference January 28-31, 2002, Tucson, AZ Hear from Lincoln D. Stein, Ewan Birney, Gene Myers, Terry Gaasterland, James Ostell, James Tisdall, and many more. ACT NOW to save over $500 on conference registration. Offer ends December 7, 2001 http://conferences.oreilly.com/biocon/ ========================================================== ============================================================ *** A Special Book Offer from O'Reilly *** "Programming Perl" & Pocket Reference Offer Receive a Free "Perl 5 Pocket Reference, 3rd Ed." (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlpr3/) when you buy "Programming Perl, 3rd Edition" (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/). This is a unique introduction to the language and its culture, as one might expect only from its authors. Offer valid only in the U.S. and only through the oreilly.com shopping cart. Use the following discount code: OPC15. Expires November 19, 2001. ============================================================ ----------------------------------------------------------------- If you want to cancel a subscription to this newsletter, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] NOTE: Please make certain to unsubscribe from the email address at which you receive this message For non-automated human help email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- For information on unsubscribing from this list, please visit http://rochester.pm.org