A few days ago, Gabor Szabo has put out a request for help packaging Padre. Since then, a few people stopped by the #padre channel on irc.perl.org willing to help with packaging Padre using PAR. After a short introduction, some stated something like "I can help with packaging Padre because we packaged a very large and complex $work application using PAR::Packer. It required a few hacks for the worst external dependencies, but apart from that it was as easy as pie."
This is great for several reasons. It means people are considering Padre important enough that they are willing to help out and share their expertise in packaging applications with PAR. But it is also one of the few occasions that I have seen folks publicly acknowledge the usefulness of the PAR toolkit. I regularly get private mail from people asking for help with packaging their big-ass $work applications because it's grown over their head. Unfortunately, those people generally also ask for a bit of confidentiality as well. So I know PAR is being used all over the place, in large and small applications alike, scaling up to tens of thousands of computers. But I mustn't point at a list of companies who use it for deployment and do the "this is enterprisey software, worship it" dance.
So dear PAR users. Please share with the world that you use it and maybe how you do. You're enjoying a good, free tool. The least you can do is give (public) feedback and share your experience with others. The same applies if you're not enjoying it at all. Let us know so we can improve it!
Cheers,
Steffen
PS: Most of this post would probably equally apply to many other successful modules. If you have stories about those, please share them as well!
Re:Squeezebox?
tsee on 2009-09-13T10:42:54
I'm not sure they use PAR for creating their executables. I think they use something else. They *do* use PAR for their plugin system. Remember because I was lobbying for that
:) Re:Squeezebox?
tsee on 2009-09-13T10:55:49
Sorry, typo. "*I* remember...."
Not worth much note, but I packaged up my SDL Phoenix bus route visualizer app for download using PAR. PAR would be great for distributing Tk style apps to the desktop in an enterprise style situation but I've never had the chance. It's always been Web for me... not to derail things here. Things like MovableType should offer PAR downloads. I've written about this before, but Perl badly needs pervasive download-and-run.
