PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

Don't we all dream of a hit game? The reality is all too often different, but it can be done. Here we find out how from Eugeny Butakov, creator of the successful mobile game, Psebay. This interview takes an in depth look at the mobile gaming scene and examines a range of aspects of game development from the tools used to issues such as monetization, distribution and piracy. We wanted the perspective of the developer, who as lone individual started from scratch, but managed to create a game that went viral.That individual is Eugeny Butakov from Russia with his trials motorcycle riding game, Psebay . full article on i-programmer

Does the dependency free nature of Mojolicious act as an invitation to people familiar with other frameworks (i.e. Ruby on Rails) and languages (i.e. PHP)? That aside, what other factors/features would lure such developers to the framework? SR: The dependency free nature of Mojolicious is actually more of a myth, the truth is that installing Mojolicious is simply a very fast and pleasant experience. One of the ways in which we’ve done this, is to make hard to install 3rd party modules like IO::Socket::SSL and Net::DNS::Native optional. full interview on Josettorama

Our journey into the world of Perl’s Web frameworks would not be complete without Mojolicious, therefore we talked to Sebastian Riedel, Mojolicious’ mastermind and Catalyst’s original founder. We looked at Mojolicious’ history: why Sebastian left Catalyst for Mojolicious , present: what does the framework actually do , the project’s future: Sebastian’s long-term plans , and whether Perl6 will have an effect on the project. We also get more technical with questions like why not opt for a DSL like Dancer does, what is meant by ‘real time web framework’ , whether the framework is dependency free and much more. full interview on Josettorama

After we looked into Catalyst, we continue our exploration of Perl’s land of Web Frameworks, with Dancer.We talk about it to one of the core devs, Sawyer X, who kindly answered our questions in a very detailed and explanatory way, rendering the interview enjoyable and comprehensible even by non techies. The interview, which spans three parts (to be published weekly), did not stop there however; we also asked his opinion and knowledge on finer grained aspects of the craft that is developing for the Web, such as what the advantage of routing over query strings is, MVC vs Routes, Perl vs PHP vs Ruby, and why CGI.pm must die! Full interview on Josettorama

Eric Lippert's name is synonymous with C#. Having been Principal Developer at Microsoft on the C# compiler team and a member of the C# language design team he now works on C# analysis at Coverity. If you know C# then the name Eric Lippert will be synonymous with clear explanations of difficult ideas and insights into the way languages work and are put together. However this didn't stop our interviewer Nikos Vaggalis (NV) from ranging over topics as diverse as the future of C#, asynchronous v parallel, Visual Basic and more.  Read on because you are sure to find something to interest you about C#, languages in general or just where things are headed. Full interview at i-programmer

What about the other Perl frameworks, Dancer and Mojolicious? How do they compare to Catalyst? Dancer’s big strength is making things quick and easy for smaller apps; you don’t have to think in terms of OO unless you want to and plugins generally shove a bunch of extra keywords into your namespace that are connected to global or per-request variables. Where Catalyst doesn’t have an exact opinion about a lot of the structure of your code but very definitely insists that you pick one and implement it, Dancer basically lets you do whatever you like and not really think too much about it . That really isn’t meant as a criticism: somewhere along the line I picked up a commit bit to Dancer as well and they’ve achieved some really good things – providing something that’s as little conceptual overhead as possible for smaller apps, and something where there’s a very direct mapping between the concepts involved and what’s actually going to happen in terms of request dispatc...

Does all that flexibility come at a price? The key price is that while there are common ways to do things, you’re rarely going to find One True Way to solve any given problem. It’s more likely to be “here’s half a dozen perfectly reasonable ways, which one is best probably depends on what the rest of your code looks like”, plus while there’s generally not much integration specific code involved, everything else is a little more DIY than most frameworks seem to require. I can put together a catalyst app that does something at least vaguely interesting in a couple hours, but doing the sort of 5 minute wow moment thing that intro screencasts and marketing copy seem to aim for just doesn’t happen, and often when people first approach catalyst they tend to get a bit overwhelmed by the various features and the way you can put them together. There’s a reflex of “this is too much, I don’t need this!”. But then a fair percentage of them come back two or three years later, have ...

We talk to Matt S. Trout, technical team leader at consulting firm Shadowcat Systems Limited, creator of the DBIx::Class ORM and of many other CPAN modules, and of course co-maintainer of the Catalyst web framework. These are some of his activities, but for this interview we are interested in Matt’s work with Catalyst. Our discussion turned out not to be just about Catalyst though. While discussing the virtues of the framework, we learned, in Matt’s own colourful language, what makes other popular web frameworks tick, managed to bring the consultant out of him who shared invaluable thoughts on architecting software as well as on the possibility of Perl 6 someday replacing Perl 5 for web development. We concluded that there’s no framework that wins by knockout, but that the game’s winner will be decided on points, points given by the final judge, your needs. Full interview on Josettorama

 NV: The JVM has been primarily designed with statically typed languages in mind. The same goes for the CLR, and that is why the DLR (build on top of CLR) came into existence.  Have you at some point considered the DLR (maybe combined with Mono instead of the CLR) or JVM’s Dynalink, both of which admittedly have a good Meta Object protocol infrastructure, as a potential backend to Rakudo?   JW:  One interesting thing to note about Perl 6 is that it’s  a gradually typed language, which means the considerations are a little different from if it was dynamically typed. In that sense, VMs which explicitly seek to do both static and dynamic typing well are especially interesting for Perl 6. I can’t speak too well to the DLR, but I do know that Niecza, the Perl 6 on CLR implementation, went the way of not using it for a range of reasons. By contrast, the JVM’s invokedynamic instruction has been rather interesting from a Perl 6 implementation point of vi...

NV: What does that say about the JVM’s project’s life expectancy? Will it run in parallel with MoarVM’s development? Does all this forecasts Parrot’s demise? JW:  The JVM is playing that difficult “second backend” role. Going from one target VM to two exposes all kinds of assumptions, such as places where things are not sufficiently well abstracted and so forth.  Such abstractions are not easy to design because you’re not only thinking about how to hide differences, but how to convey enough semantic information downwards in order to allow good code generation. Having the second VM that  is already mature and well established is a huge help. OK, I did manage to segfault the JVM thanks to the odd invokedynamic bug I managed to hit upon. But by and large, if something is wrong, I can be pretty sure that the JVM itself will not be to blame. So, the JVM porting leads the way. That naturally means we’ll get to a rather complete Rakudo on JVM some way ahead of...

The latest news is that Parrot Virtual Machine is no longer the only one enjoying Rakudo’s exclusivity. Not long after Rakudo had been successfully ported to the JVM a new hosting candidate that aims to change the rules of the game, MoarVM, went public. All that activity has raised a lot of questions regarding Parrot, Rakudo and the direction Perl 6 is heading for: Is Parrot dead ? Why yet another VM and what’s up with the JVM? How does Perl 6 stack up against other modern languages like C# ? Is there any room in the programming world for it, after all? For getting the definitive answers to these intriguing questions, we’ve managed to get hold of Jonathan Worthington for an exclusive interview. Jonathan is the architectural mastermind and primary driving force behind not only Rakudo’s implementation, but also all the projects revolving around it, such as NQP, the port on the JVM, and now the brand new MoarVM. As if simultaneously engaging in these cognitively d...

In this interview, which completes a trilogy on implementations of Perl 6, we talk to Flávio Glock about Perlito, the compiler collection that implements a subset of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It is a very interesting discussion that revolves around topics like parsing, bootstraping, VM's, optimizations and much more. Flávio Glock Soibelmann has developed several CPAN modules for the DateTime Dashboard. He is currently one of the developers of Perl and Perlito is his main current project. Full interview on i-programmer

All about Perl 6 – interview of Stefan O’Rear All about Perl 6 – interview of Moritz Lenz

Continuing our in-depth exploration of Perl 6 implementations we interviewed Stefan O'Rear about the Niecza project, the Perl 6 implementation for the .NET and Mono platform. Link

We set  out to investigate the latest developments in Perl 6 and Parrot and find out why Perl6 stands out from other  programming languages. Our questions were answered by  Moritz Lenz, a prominent Perl 5 hacker and member of the People of Perl 6, as well as a regular contributor to both the Perl 6 test suite and the Rakudo compile interview link

InfoQ expands on the IronJS i-programmer interview

We set out to investigate what it takes to implement a dynamic language for the .NET platform and the DLR, and what better way than to ask someone that has already done it. So we interviewed Fredrik Holmström who has successfully ported Javascript under the name of IronJS, consistent with the naming pattern of the .NET dynamic languages like IronRuby or IronPython. We discovered what possibilities a dynamic language adds on top of the static CLR languages, what the porting process is, as well as a deep look into the IronJS internals. Full article on i-programmer

An interview with Roy Hann

I've just published a news piece on the UKIUA Conference on iProgrammer which also includes an overview of Ingres as a company as well as the RDBMS