I was at the 2008 European Perl Conference recently and one of the talks I heard was about HTML 5.0. It may seem odd to have such a talk at a Perl conference, but web development is one of the things Perl is used quite heavily for. I went along not really expecting to come away particularly excited. Instead, I came away feeling that they really are going down the right lines.

The thing I like about HTML 5.0 is its pragmatism. It accepts that various things just, well, are the way they are. Whether you think any of the following are points are OK, they are pretty much reality.

• Most web pages don't specify a document type
• Of those that do, plenty of pages don't comply with the document type anyway and a validator would say they were invalid
• Despite this situation, end users expect that web pages that in the eyes of a validator are invalid will still be rendered; any browser that only renders compliant pages will not be able to provide access to much of the web and wouldn't be used by anyone anyway...

When you search for ASP.NET WYSIWYG editors on the Internet, you find loads of plain HTML-based editors. They are typically deployed in web-based content management systems, in which they are used to edit HTML snippets. All of them are based on existing browser technology:

- Internet Explorer offers the DHTML control to edit the HTML - Firefox has Midas, the pendant to the MS DHTML control

The advantage of this technology is that the browser does not require a plug-in or an ActiveX control. However, using this technology, it is not possible to modify complete word processing documents, such as MS Word or RTF files. Furthermore, it is not possible to edit, nor add headers and footers, text frames and other such sophisticated features...

As an intelligent woman, I've always loved challenging myself..so, 8 months ago when I decided to embark on a computer science degree, I really didn't for see any surprises headed my way. All of a sudden, as I dive deeper and deeper into the realm of coding and mastering things like regx in Perl..I find myself coding for days on end, not sleeping, hardly eating, becoming almost reclusive. This may very well be the most addictive behavior I have ever exhibited. My friends, none of which have the slightest clue as to what a comp language is or does, are worried about me!!! lol It would appear that I'm being sucked in, I love it...I love coding...it's a whole new intensity and level of creation. Am I crazy?? Do other geeks have this experience?

Abstract

The process of establishing a database connection can be time consuming depending upon network connectivity. Connection pooling is a viable option if the network is an issue, and database server resources are available. I'll begin by discussing connection pooling and examining how you may use it in your .NET applications.

Introduction

Connecting to the database is resource intensive and a relatively slow operation in an application but the most crucial of them all. There are several steps involved with establishing a database connection. First, you will establish a connection to the database server over the network. Next, the connection string is parsed and the user authenticated. Finally, the connection is established, and operations may be performed. Connection pooling allows an application to maintain ownership of a database connection...

Dear oh so wonderful ASP.NET,

I know that we programmers are far, far more stupid than your code generator. Clearly, if I write:

<form action="BoardEdit.aspx" method="post" runat="server">

Then actually you might as well assume I'd written:

<form method="post" runat="server">

And left you to figure out what the form action should be, because you can do that perfectly every time, fully accounting for the URL re-writing. If I suggest something different, clearly I would never have a good reason for doing this (for example, in the case that you've got no damm clue how to respect URL re-writing rules, but oh no, that would NEVER happen, would it? Oh, wait...).

Love (the thought of punching) you loads,

Jonathan

When we are speaking we often use words such as "it" to refer to the thing we are currently talking about. For example, "My computer has just had a PSU failure. It is on fire." You could say that "it" refers to the current topic, which we assigned in the previous sentence.

Anyone who's read many of my ramblings will know that one thing that interests me is the use of features of natural language in programming languages. What if we could express the idea of the current topic in a programming language, though?

Turns out that is exactly what the $_ variable in Perl is for. It is sometimes also known as the "default variable". If you have read many Perl scripts you will probably have come across things like this:

chomp;
s/\[b\](.*?)\[\/b\]/<b>$1<\/b>/;
print;

The question that people often ask on seeing this is - chomp what? Bind a substitution to what? Print what? A fairly substantial number of Perl built-ins, when invoked a parameter missing, will use the default variable $_ instead. You could re-write the above as:...

Today represents exactly twenty years since the very first release of the Perl programming language! On 18th December 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1.0. Twenty years on there has been another release of Perl: Perl 5.10. Five years in development, Perl 5.10 makes some significant advances on the Perl 5.8 series both in terms of performance and features, while maintaining backwards compatibility with Perl 5.8.

The regex engine, always a strength of Perl, has seen a whole raft of improvements. Some of these include performance enhancements, and others are new features; if is now, for example, much easier to write recursive regexes for matching nested structures. You can also name captures rather than just referring to them by number, which will bring readability enhancements...

This is a review of Alpha 5, a tool for developing database backed web and desktop applications.

Distributed by: Alpha Software
Price: From $199 for IDE, from $399 for web application server

An awful lot of web and desktop applications are very similar: basically, just front ends to databases. Therefore there is a market for tools that make the job easier or do a lot of the tedious repetitive work for you. This not only saves time over hand-rolling the application yourself, but saves you from fixing the same types of bugs again and again. I've been there and written such a tool for web-based front ends myself. One of the largest challenges is making the most common things really easy without making the less common things really hard or just plain impossible.

What is Alpha Five?

I'm reviewing version 8 of Alpha Five. You can get a free trial version that lasts 30 days, if you want to follow along with the application I'm going to try and build in this review. But first, let's see what it claims to offer...

I answered a question on the Perl forum today about splitting CSV. CSV is a comma separated format; for example:

blah,blah,blah

You can put values in quotes:

blah,"blah blah",blah

And those quotes make commas within them meaningless too:

blah,"blah,blah,blah",blah

If we do the naive thing and implement it using split on a comma:

my @fields = split(/,/, $string);

Then we will obviously get the Wrong Answer. The question was, is there a regex we can use with split that will do the Right Thing? And the answer was yes, though it took me a few minutes to come up with it. The thing is that we don't want to match anything more than the commas we are splitting on, but we do need to do some analysis on the string that is up ahead (or behind us) to detect if the comma we are seeing is in quotes...

This is because the server control tags were not converted into their respecting HTML element tags by ASP.Net. This happens when ASP.Net is not properly registered with IIS. .Net framework provides an Administration utility that manages the installation and uninstallation of multiple versions of ASP.NET on a single machine. You can find the file in C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v**\aspnet_regiis.exe use the command: aspnet_regiis.exe -u ---> to uninstall current asp.net version. use the command: aspnet_regiis.exe -i ---> to install current asp.net version.

I've spent the last few days at the French Perl Workshop. As well as my brand new talk, I gave two re-runs of two that I had given before. One was entirely new to the French audience, and the other one was from quite a while back and given a face lift so it seemed new (in fact, it was the first talk I ever gave to the Perl community; it was on the topic of web security, and from the web code I encounter it is no less relevant today than it was then). That was 100 minutes worth of talks, which was a pleasure thanks to a great audience...

I've got a brand new talk in the works, which I will be delivering at both the French Perl Workshiop (Lyon, 16th-17th November) and the Israeli Perl Workshiop (Tel Aviv, 31st December). I will be talking on the topic of parallelism - why we need to do it, how (not) to screw it up, what Perl 6 will bring to the table and some of the latest research for future ideas, including lock-free data structures. I hope to announce more European dates for the talk over the coming months, subject to it being accepted at more conferences.

Well, I figured I may as well make the first post in my PH blog vaguely controversial. If the title's not enough for you, then let me go on to suggest that the Bible has some useful advice in it for those of us trying to decode the continual stream of acronyms that the computing industry likes to throw at us.

"What has been will be again,
 what has been done will be done again;
 there is nothing new under the sun."
    -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

One of the things that amuses me most about the computing industry is how we seem to keep getting shiny new names for the same old technologies, perhaps just applied in a different problem domain or using a different language...