(Bizarre... I could have sworn that I made a short entry yesterday evening, but it's not there now.)
Anyway, I'm glad for CPAN and the Perl culture of developing tools that they share with others. Right now, I'd like to express my appreciation for Honza Pazdziora's XBase and DBD::XBase modules.
I'm working on a project for work that will involve reading and possibly also writing XBase files. We were wondering about how to go about doing that, especially since the target machine for the data was an HP server running under HP-UX (which would make using ODBC, for example, more difficult). We considered getting an ODBC driver, using Delphi and the BDE, using the Xbase library (which is C++, unfortunately, and our HP compiler only does C), and CodeBase (which is available for HP-UX but costs mucho dinero), among other things. Then I thought of DBD::XBase.
I got permission to try it out and settled on using the more low-level module XBase.pm, since for the first task I just wanted to read sequentially through the entire file and export the data to another format. Within the day, I had a small program up and running that read XBase files and output HP Allbase "unload to external" format (basically fixed width with an associated description file). Fun!
I presume that writing XBase will be similarly easy. Project leader is a little worried that the format might not be quite what the application which reads those files will expect, but we'll see when we get that far.
Perl -- for all your rapid prototyping and data munging needs!
