Summersault Blog

At Summersault we build websites with a modified version of the Titanium framework. While Titanium continues to work very well for us, I always like to keep up with other possibilities. There are always new places to find inspiration and there’s always room for improvement. In that spirit I’ve recently explored HTTP::Engine and Mojo. Looking at how these options fit into the bigger picture of Perl frameworks, I wrote an article called Evolution of Perl Frameworks for Perlbuzz.com. Here’s the full article.

Earlier this year, I made some notable contributions to various open-source projects, including:

• Tim Bunce, the author of Perl’s DBI asked me to be a committer on the DBIx::HA project, a high-availability/load-balancing Perl module.
• I uploaded a new release of CGI::Session, version 4.30. As the official maintainer of the module, I worked closely with Ron Savage who did most of the release work. Summersault will likely take advantage of these improvements in the future.
• Multiple people gave me praise for my help with the Darcs 2 release. One person wrote, “Mark Stosberg was an unsung hero of the darcs-2 project for diligently triaging and following-up on hundreds of bug tracker tickets. His quality-assurance work (including setting up automated buildbot tests) is an important reason that darcs-2 is much less buggy.” By patch count, I’ve committed the third most patches to the project due to numerous documentation and test suite improvements.

These are just some of the ways that Summersault staff participate in the online community and in the open-source software movement.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because we want to try to be all things to our clients doesn’t mean that we can be. Of course, for any given project, the conversation about what’s possible, and on what timeline, and at what cost is never a simple one. The bigger the project, the more complex that conversation becomes. It can be easy to over-promise and under-deliver if you’re not extremely careful.

Several years ago, we began using parts of the “Extreme Programming (XP)” software engineering paradigm in our development process, with the goal of improving our time estimates, better understanding what we were able to deliver to our clients and when. I’ve not found any part of XP to be more useful than the way it describes the interactions between these four variables:
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Today I uploaded the first release of Titanium, a web application framework. This project really began about eight years ago, with first release of CGI::Application.

CGI::Application was and is a great foundation for web applications and has always been well defined with a small scope for what it would provide in terms of a framework. Because of this it was able to mature and stabilize with few bugs ever reported and always provided great performance because of its small size. It grew in popularity, and over 50 CGI::Application plugins were released.

The contributed plugins were a great gift back to the community from the many users who made them, but for newcomers, the choices could be daunting. They meant getting started with CGI::Application for an application of any size often meant wading through the many options for plugins, yet often coming to the same conclusions about which ones to choose.

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CHICAGO, IL — Summersault is proud to continue its sponsorship of the YAPC::NA Perl technology conference, which concluded in Chicago this week. The event brings together developers, vendors, businesses and end-users from all parts of North America to discuss the latest tools and trends related to the Perl programming language.

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HOUSTON, TX – Summersault website development is proud to be a Gold-level sponsor for YAPC::NA 2007, a national Perl conference that begins today in Houston, Texas. The event brings together developers, vendors, businesses and end-users from all parts of North America to discuss the latest tools and trends related to the Perl programming language. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark hasn’t had time to create a weblog entry about this yet, so I thought I would note that he recently had an article published on Perl.com entitled Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application, which is all about the popular and mature Perl CGI::Application framework for web applications. It’s definitely for geeky web developers like us, but shows how we’re keeping track of the latest trends and tools for efficiently creating robust web applications for our clients (and designing the logo for some of those tools too). Nice job, Mark!

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.
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RICHMOND, IN — Summersault staff members Matt Christian, Mark Stosberg and Chris Hardie have just returned from attending the 2006 “Yet Another Perl Conference in North America,” a professional developers conference for users of the Perl programming language. The event was held in Chicago, IL from June 25 to June 28 and was sponsored by industry names such as Google, O’Reilly, apress, ValueClick and many others. Read the rest of this entry »

A subset of the Summersault staff are here in Chicago together, about to attend the 2006 “Yet Another Perl Conference North America” conference (yapcna2006). We spent the day getting here, having Thai food for dinner and walking around Michigan avenue a bit (the Apple store had already closed). We thought when we got home we’d just hop right on the newly established DSL connection waiting for us - but it turned out to be a nightmarish slogging through poorly designed setup processes, router peculiarities, pilot error and impatience, etc. We’re online now and excited that the conference will inspire/instill a little more technical savvy than we experienced tonight. We’re hoping to post some photos and notes here as the week progresses, stay tuned.