Wednesday was filled with anticipation. The YAPC::Europe entrance to The Spires conference centre was a little tricky to find initially, but it was quite an impressive building. The stained glass windows, ceiling and the pipes of the organ, giving away its original church design. The stage and seating were set for the conference welcome and we waited with bated breath. Marty, as acting MC, welcomed everyone to Belfast and got a raptuous applause. Dispite some of the problems they'd faced, it was good to know we were still on course for a great conference.
Following the introductory speech, Allison Randal took to the stage for the keynote speech, 'State Of The Carrot'. I liked the idea of the title and all, but I was expecting a bit more from the speech than a roll call of fixes in Perl, Parrot and PONIE. I was hoping to be inspired by the cool stories from behind the scenes, or something akin to Larry's State Of The Onion speech. Instead for me it fell a bit flat. Even though the carrot jokes were intentionally bad, it didn't add anything to content of the talk. A break for coffee (and tea) followed, incorporating a mad rush for wi-fi, hub and power points.
It wasn't until later that I realised I knew the guy sitting looking after the network hub. Jason Clifford, who I had met briefly at The AFFS conference earlier this year, had impressed me by giving away all his profits from his company, UK Free Software Network, to the AFFS to promote Free Software projects in the UK. A very commendable fellow.
We were then onto the first run of regular talks before lunch. Unfortunately the Belfast guys had been very let down by the number of speakers. Several people who had previously said they were coming, some even getting as far as submitting talks, failed to even get back to the organisers to say the couldn't make it. Although some had very good reasons, far too many dropped out. However, that's not to say we didn't have some very good talks, it just meant we finished a little earlier each day. It was noted that several notable US speakers were missing, especially after a few had made noises to the effect that they were attending. I don't know their reasons for not attending, but it did feel they let the side down. Nevertheless we were treated to some great talks.
Staying in the main hall, Jos Boumans presented a talk called 'POE to the Rescue'. If you were at Paris last year, you will have seen a version of this talk. Everyone who saw it had raved about it afterwards, so I was determined to see it this time around. The talk is largely about the online game Utopia, and how Jos and his friends managed to infiltrate and virtually take over the game. It has several hilarious moments, but at the core of the talk are some very cool Perl scripts. Jos used POE in several ways, and managed to present a very good example of how you can use POE. If he ever does this again, go see it, it's great fun and you learn something too.
WWW Smackdown was up next, which featured a series of talks relating to the web. I got to watch 2 of the talks, before venturing off to another room. BooK presented ACT (A Conference Toolkit), which was basically the software Paris.pm used to implement their site for YAPC::Europe::2003. It had some interesting aspects, although for Birmingham.pm we already have a website ready to go now :)
Next up was Maypole by Simon Cozens. Sitting from the side I was a little confused by why Simon was only using the bottom two thirds of his slides, while the top third was blank. On moving closer I discover he'd actually thought it a good idea to use *yellow* titles on a *white* background. It was hard enough to read for regular sighted people, I hate to think how hard it was for anyone who was colour-blind. I may be missing something, but what is wrong with black text on a white background (or at least some other high contrast colours)?
While Maypole has certainly been getting considerable amounts of press coverage, I really didn't feel it was anything to get too excited about. Sure if you have a simple requirement on your data, and are not bothered about authentication, then Maypole looks to be a viable tool for the job. However, if you need any level of security or slightly different requirements on the data presentation, it starts to look a lot like hard work. I certainly didn't feel like I was in any position to start using it after the talk, but then I tend to have a lot more demands on my data, the presentation of said data, and the authorisation & authentication required for said data in most of my applications. However, it was good to see who it works in practice.
After the coffee break I headed for the Moveable Type room, where Hendrik Van Belleghem was presenting a talk on Image Manipulation with Perl and C. This was interesting for me in that I'm currently overseeing the image filtering project within MessageLabs. However, seeing as the talk was only 20 minutes long, it meant Hendrik could only scratched the surface. This is one talk that would have greatly benefitted from a longer slot. Unfortunately I didn't learn anything new here, and much of what was presented was featured in a Birmingham.pm technical talk by Paul Whitehead. However, the timings Hendrik gave were interesting.
Last talk of the day for me, and several other MessageLabs guys, was Building A Mail Server With Apache And mod_perl by Mock. Matt Sergeant had already proved how qpsmtd could act as a web server, so a little of thunder was taken out of the talk. But this didn't deter Mock, who had purely done it in the first place to prove it could be done. It was still a good talk and has served to see Apache::TieBucketBrigade hit CPAN :)
Back to the hotel to dump stuff, and plan for the night ahead. While waiting in the lobby, Geoff Avery introduced several of us to Fluxx. He started a phenonmemon that was to last throughout the conference. After only a short while, a significant number of Birmingham.pm and Paris.pm, along with a few others were totally engrossed in the game. So engrossed that we agreed to move to the hotel restaurant and carry on playing while we ordered dinner ... and ate dinner ... and pudding! Dinner came and went, we reorganised the tables, got more beer in and carried on. We lasted until about 1am before finally deciding to find sleep.
I used a combination of CDBI and Maypole to build an ecommerce website in a small ammount of spare time and that included learning both and setting up a new server for it all from scratch.
The front end uses CDBI and custom mod_perl handlers, the backend uses Maypole and the same CDBI classes and different authentication to the frontend. Many of the underlying modules are re-used and I suspect I could re-use and share a lot more code between the front and back
Using Maypole and CDBI meant I was able to very quickly prototype how I wanted the application to work and populate it with data and relationships before building the front end.
The templates provided are easy to customise, and authentication and authorisation are getting better support with more ready-rolled modules.
If you are using CDBI then it is a no-brainer to use Maypole on top. Otherwise both your application and Maypole may require some extra work.
Fortunately, there is pretty active development and enthusiastic users who know what they want and need, I think that it will quickly overcome some of its current limitation - the Mason View developers have learned from the TT View included at the start and this should feed back to improve the TT views some more. Extensions and improvements to CDBI also allow it to grow as do more recipes, documentations and Maypole CPAN modules.
It might be quicker to ensure the limitations that affect you are fixed or resolved with Maypole than to go your own way.. YMMV of course
Re:Maypole
barbie on 2004-09-28T06:29:07
I certainly haven't counted out looking at Maypole again in the future. However, the presentation Simon gave didn't really make me feel I was gaining anything more from what I've already got.I had a chat with Richard Clamp afterwards and we were discussing CDBI. I had a few misconceptions about it, and although I have tried it, it didn't feel like I was getting a benefit from it. Rich said there is a jump in the learning curve that is a bit like learning a second language with CDBI, where a switch gets flipped in your brain and suddenly everything becomes clear
... I still haven't made the jump. Once that thought process is obvious, the wider use for Maypole is a lot clearer. So I will be revisiting it, just not yet :)
Re:Math
barbie on 2004-09-28T06:34:38
It's one of those subjects that can be a lot of fun to talk about, and always leave the audience wanting more... no matter how long you talk for :) For those that have never come across image manipulation it was a very worthwhile talk, and will hopefully get them interested enough to go and find out more for themselves.
Actually, Act is the software we built for the French Perl Workshop 2004 (aka Les Journées Perl) based on our experience with YAPC::Europe 2003.
The goal is to improve it for the second French Perl Workshop and make the platform available to all monger groups though the YAPC Europe Foundation. At least three teams (outside the French) are interested in using it in 2005.
I also thought Simon's slide titles were barely visible (don't think it'd be any worse for colour-blind people though — the yellow may not look yellow, but I don't think there's any variant of colour blindness where it'd look white).
However, in Simon's defence, that projector in the main hall did seem to have an unusual colour balance. Part way through my talk I realized that some of the syntax-coloured code being demoed in Vim was nearly invisible (so got Aaron, my keyboard monkey, to turn off colouring). I've demoed Vim before and that hasn't been a problem, so there was something different about that projector (or that room).
Smylers
