London Perl Mongers had a tech meet at Morgan Stanley last night. This is the coolest venue we've been in yet. Not only did they have a massive back projected screen, but every two seats had their own LCD screen showing what was on the main screen. How cool is that?
Oh the Perl! Yes, we did talk about that. Andy kicked off with his talk on Template::Sitemap, which is essentially how he created a simple XML format that, with a shedload of convince, can be easily accessed from within his website. Looked good - I've implemented similar things in the past, but never really abstracted it out from the site I was working on or added the functionality that makes the sitemap manageable. I look forward to the CPAN release.
Andy was followed by Shevek explaining Acme::HaltingProblem (which apparently has only one bug), and then jerakeen gave his talk on Bot::BasicBot. Bot::BasicBot was one of my modules that I gave up ownership on because I didn't have time to implement all the features that people were requesting. Tom's done a lot of work, especially in the boring mundane sections, like getting the damn thing to connect to channel if it fails for any network reason. I'd never have had the patience to do that.
After the break Nik talked about use DateTime to compute sets and intersections to work out a combination of outages on his network. Many questions were asked. Nik agreed that he'd post to the DateTime list to talk about it, so I await that post. He went on to talk about Text::vFile::asData that looks interesting, and reminds me that I should talk to richardc about applying some of the work they've been doing on parsing/generating iCal feeds to doing more with the London.pm.ics feed.
Shevek talked about SRS, which is a scheme for rewriting email addresses that are forwarded in order to verify that they came from where you thought they did when they're forwarded.
Finally Simon talked about Maypole, which as far as I can gather is toolkit for creating ways of rendering and editing databases, with powerful default states. Big applications in twenty lines of code. Powerful combination of Template Toolkit and Class::DBI. Looked interesting. I will wait the month he's going to spend (thanks to TPF donations) documenting the code.
I really enjoyed this meet. As I was saying to James, none of the talks were "This is the best thing in the world ever" or "We've developed the new framework that's going to make everything else obsolete". They were "there's this problem, and we wrote this/used this tool which was helpful maybe you'll find it helpful or do something similar too". I was impressed greatly by the number of talks that talked about other approaches that they'd tried and showed how they'd prototyped similar solutions in the past. Conference organisers take note: These are the kind of talks we really liked.
