I attended ApacheCon 2004 in Las Vegas this week with my coworkers Aaron Ross and Perrin Harkins. The last time I was at ApacheCon was 2001, which was in San Jose, California. I got a chance to meet some of the community legends, which was great. Lots of really smart people who are experts in their fields. As I've seen Perrin's talk a few times I didn't attend it but I'll give a brief summary here of the perl related talks I did attend.
mod_perl 2.0 at Warp Speed was given by Geoffrey Young. I've been using mod_perl 2.0 for almost a year, and it rocks. He started off by giving an overview of the mod_perl 2.0 api as compared to mp1. There's something like 400+ methods in mod_perl 2.0, around double the number in mp1. He went on to give an example of using Directive handlers in mod_perl 2.0, followed by a demonstration of using output filters. What was really awesome about this talk was the demonstration of working code, and the way Geoffrey walked through the source by using dark/light contrast highlights in his presentation to illustrate specific sections of the code. He finished off the talk with a walkthrough of Apache::Test. One aspect of Geoff's speaking style I really enjoyed was that he was able to keep the audiences attention through interacting with the audience versus a monotonic lecture style which I saw in a fair amount of other presentations.
Testing PHP with Perl: Two Great tases that Taste Great Together was given also by Geoffery Young along with Chris Shiflett. Gozer handed out candy at the beginning of the talk which was greatly appreciated by those of us who had been sitting through talks all day. This talk was great, as it played upon the tongue-in-check rivalry between PHP and Perl in an entertaining manner to demonstrate how to test PHP applications with Apache::Test. Chris and Geoff built a PHP implementation of Test::More, and using that they were able to test PHP web applications in the same manner as Perl web applications.
I'm going to give a quick summary of Clustered logging with mod_log_spread also. While this isn't a Perl-centric talk, if you build web applications with Perl you need to check out mod_log_spread. Spread is a robust message passing environment for communicating between processes whether on the same machine or not. I first saw Theo Schlossnagle at ApacheCon 2001 where he gave a presentation of mod_backhand. He gave an overview of mod_log_spread's features, and demostrated a real-time log statistics monitor. Spread has a Perl API, and I'm looking forward to doing something cool with it.
