Personal Perl programming 'best practices'

Blog entry for accumulating "best practice" notes.

Perl development workflow

There is a Perl module that I have been developing. It is now finding its way onto CPAN and the openSUSE Build Service; the process of reaching that goal, however, was a bit tedious -- hence this blog entry which will describe the workflow so I won't have to reinvent the wheel each time I want to do this again.

JavaScript, DOM, HTML, CSS

JavaScript, DOM, HTML, CSS (client-side web programming in general)

JavaScript

• By far the best on-line JavaScript resource I've found so far is a series of lectures by Douglas Crockford entitled "Crockford on JavaScript". The entire series is available at youtube.com
• JavaScript comes of age: ES5/Strict (May 2013)
• Google JavaScript Style Guide (August 2014)
• JavaScript section at Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) (August 2014)
• JavaScript Character Encoding, UTF-8 (May 2013)

CSS

• CSS

JavaScript comes of age: ES5/Strict

When writing programs in JavaScript, ES5/Strict (also known as "Strict Mode") is the way to go:

• Strict Mode (Mozilla Developer Network article)

ChicagoBoss reading list

* ChicagoBoss API
* ChicagoBoss Wiki
* ChicagoBoss tutorial (PDF)
* An Evening With Chicago Boss
* Eunit testing with Erlang and Chicago Boss
* ChicagoBoss, JSON, AJAX (April 2013)

CSS reading list

* Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps

mfile now on Github

Mfile reading list

* Github repo: https://github.com/smithfarm/mfile
* Project wiki: https://github.com/smithfarm/mfile/wiki

I set up a repository on Github for my mfile project -- an old database application I wrote many moons ago in C for tracking paper and electronic files. The project involves completely rewriting the application in Erlang using the Chicago Boss web framework so it runs in a browser (the original application ran in a terminal using the ncurses library). The database backend (PostgreSQL) will not change, but the data will be re-encoded from ISO-8859-2 to UTF-8.

After following the instructions from Github, the repository worked but, I had to install the openssh-askpass package to avoid errors like "/usr/lib/ssh/x11-ssh-askpass: No such file or directory" and "error: cannot run git-credential-cache--daemon: No such file or directory":

# zypper in openssh-askpass

Now it's smooth sailing:

$ vim file-in-repo
...
$ git commit -a -m "Description of change"
$ git push -u origin master
... enter credentials ...

Database programming with Perl and PostgreSQL

Assuming you have perl and PostgreSQL already installed and running on openSUSE.

Refer to this tutorial at TechRepublic.

Install the Perl DBI and the PostgreSQL database driver for the DBI:

# zypper install perl-DBI perl-DBD-Pg
Loading repository data...
[output cropped]

How to compile putty

So you need to hack putty, but when you try to compile it, it chokes. Here's what you need (in addition to build-essential and the like).

Putty uses the GTK library, so you need the developer's version of that. I'm using:

# apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

That's it. Now, install the Terminus fonts package:

# apt-get install xfonts-terminus

Now compile and run it:

$ cd putty-0.62/unix
$ make -f Makefile.gtk
$ ./putty

Using the setup menus, set the default translation to UTF-8 and the default font to Terminus.

That's it.