Summersault Weblog

It’s been over a week since we returned from YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference) in Chicago, and now is a good time to recap some of the interesting and noteworthy things we learned about and observed from our three days at the conference.

One of the conference’s main attractions was a series of presentations about the development of the new version of the Perl programming language: Perl 6. We’ve been hearing for many months about some of the impressive new features that Perl 6 will have, and the presentations at YAPC didn’t disappoint. Since many of the presenters were core members of the Perl 6 development team, we were given firsthand accounts of the project’s status and plenty of mind-boggling features were discussed. There was definitely a sense of amazement (approaching awe) from the audience, and it was clear that a lot of people have put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into the project, and it is exciting to know that the Perl community will soon be able to make use of the fancy new features we’ve all been hearing about. Indeed, just a few days ago it was announced that a new (experimental) version of Perl 6 has been released, and although a lot more work still needs to be done, it certainly feels like Perl 6 is almost just around the corner.

Another key point of interest at the conference was the subject of automated testing. Summersault has been using Perl for automated testing (via the Test::WWW::Mechanize module) as a part of our quality assurance practices—especially for large-scale projects—for a few years now. Unfortunately, we also got the sense there were not very many other web developers that we were using automated testing, so we felt somewhat in the minority in this practice. Therefore, when the conference schedule was released, it was good to see that a number of presentations were on the topic of automated testing, oftentimes with a focus on testing for database-backed web applications. We learned about a few new Perl modules that should help us refine and broaden our testing practices, and we especially enjoyed learning more about Selenium, a browser-based testing tool that we’d used occasionally in the past. Because of our familiarity with most of the tools discussed, we felt that Summersault was generally ahead of the automated testing curve, and we all expect that automated testing for web applications will become even more prevalent in the future. It was also comforting to know that there are, in fact, a number of other web developers out there (at least within the Perl community) that currently do use automated testing for their web applications.

In conclusion, the 2006 Chicago YAPC conference was a success, and the Summersault contingent certainly enjoyed it. Yes, there were some snags (like the subpar wireless internet connection, for example) and it would’ve been nice to have some presentations or more formal discussions about Perl’s relative strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other programming languages (especially with in the “hot new arena” of web application development). We also would’ve liked to have seen a demographic breakdown of the conference attendees. How many people actually attended? How many were from which countries, states, and provinces? What different levels of experience did attendees have with using Perl? That kind of information would have been interesting to know, and it also might’ve helped presenters customize their presentations better to their audience. But by and large, YAPC will be remembered because of its many interesting and entertaining presentations and because of the opportunities to visit with friends, meet new people, and strengthen existing connections.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Perl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.