San Francisco Perl Users Group Archives: April 2004
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Next Meeting: Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Modularity through Frozen Data Structures, with Rich Morin of Prime Time Freeware
Another free-pizza event, courtesy of Level Acuity.RSVP to Quinn Weaver, qw at sf.pm.org, if you plan to come.
Rich writes:
Rich Morin is doing "document mechanization" (or some such :-) for a software development project at SLAC. Every morning, his scripts harvest the latest information from the build tree, turn it into YAML, and then produce several hundred web pages (most with generated diagrams) and a scattering of PDF files.
After a guided tour of the web site, Rich will discuss the design of the system. His approach to modularity is based on standard Unix ideas (small programs, little languages, textual data files), but the addition of YAML allows him to "freeze" arbitrary data structures as files, allowing them to be loaded and navigated by other programs.
Treating data into a "first-class citizen" (as opposed to the OO notion of wrapping all data structures with "accessor" methods) has some real benefits in flexibility, modularity, etc. OTOH, managing several dozen scripts and several hundred files is no picnic! FYI, the web site is available for inspection at
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/exp/glast/flight/web/FSW_home.shtml.As in previous meetings, free pizza will be provided, sponsored by Level Acuity, a San Francisco-based provider of Perl staffing and projects.
Location and directions follow... [more]
Posted by Quinn Weaver @ 10:32 AM PST [Link]
