Slashdot Mirror

Perl has been available for Windows for a long time. You can get it here.

This might help you if you switch back and forth as you get more used to linux. I don't think it's very mature on linux yet, but it may be worth keeping an eye on.

This might help you if you switch back and forth as you get more used to linux. I don't think it's very mature on linux yet, but it may be worth keeping an eye on.

First of all perl is much older then php and is by far better tested and supported. The minimum php has to do is to port/support most of the CPAN (http://www.cpan.org) modules, which really help to provide fast and easy application development.

Secondly, why should one learn two different languages to do two different things? ;) Take for a example, standalone (data/system-maintainence scripts) and a web application. Why should I do web part in php and, say, db-to-files-dumping-from-cron in perl? Why should not I use perl for both? You may say that one can use php for those "standalone" scripts, but how convinient that is?

Thirdly, I have not seen any particular advantage of php that is not present in perl. Niether did I see anything which is easier in php. But that is subjective imho ;)

Perl is also easily run in both CGI mode and HTML embedded (http://perl.apache.org). Perl is installed on lot's of systems and it comes with the distributions of most UNIXes. There is even a popular perl interpreter for Windows (http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/).

Anyway, php has no chances to make perl obsolete, since perl has million of other appliences except the web. And even to make perl obsolete for web development, php has a long road to go, though I am following the development a bit, and I like just having another alternative in the future ;)

Komodo had no licence, but the source code was on the site. To install Komodo, you have to agree that you are using a product that is owned by ActiveState - you don't have any ownership of what you just downloaded.

I'm pretty excited. I've been waiting for a Perl IDE for a long time and I plan on trying both this and the Visual Perl product they are releasing.

I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.

There goes the neighborhood.

Note that ActivePerl isn't entirely free software:
ActivePerl is freely distributable. However, ActiveState puts considerable time, effort and resources into developing and further enhancing ActivePerl. Charges for commercial redistribution of ActivePerl reflect our time in establishing the agreement and, if you have difficulty meeting our marketing requirements, any lost opportunities that we have in our market.

This would seem to be a clear violation of the GPL.

Perl for .NET

Python for .NET

.NET Framework Community Website

ASP.NET

and of course,

MSDN .NET Developer Center

FWIW, asp.net and gotdotnet.com are supposedly running the .NET platform.

Perl for .NET

Python for .NET

.NET Framework Community Website

ASP.NET

and of course,

MSDN .NET Developer Center

FWIW, asp.net and gotdotnet.com are supposedly running the .NET platform.

It's already released (well, as beta at least). MS sent out the beta kit for Visual Studio .NET about a month ago, anyone can get it and try it out. A few weeks ago, ActiveState released the Visual Perl plugin for VS.NET, along with Perl for .NET.

I'd say .NET already has a strong presence, for better or for worse. The Question really is when it's actually going to be released as a final product.

It's already released (well, as beta at least). MS sent out the beta kit for Visual Studio .NET about a month ago, anyone can get it and try it out. A few weeks ago, ActiveState released the Visual Perl plugin for VS.NET, along with Perl for .NET.

I'd say .NET already has a strong presence, for better or for worse. The Question really is when it's actually going to be released as a final product.

Wow. I had wondered where that 'e' was. Cheers for that. I showed my mum (ex-COBOL hax0r for Burroughs) the COBOL.NET stuff from MS. She didn't believe me. (this is also funny). I wonder how long it'll be before "technology archaeologist" becomes a major university discipline?

First, get the cygnus (now owned by RedHat) toolkit . This gives you a great many unix type commands (tar, ls, cp, dd, less, cat, pwd, ftp, cut, sort, etc), and a real bash shell, and a decent terminal window. Just having the bash autocompletion and command line history is worth the price of download, not to mention your directory slashes now go the right way :)

Next, get yourself the activestate perl port for windows. This gives you perl, which combined with the cygnus toolset makes easy and highly portable scripts very easy to throw together.

Next, get the putty secure shell tools . This gives you pscp (like rcp, but better in every regard) and a pssh (a secure telnet replacement). These will both connect right up with a RedHat 7 system running the openSSH stuff right out of the box.

Of course, get the latest version of emacs for windows.

Finally, just for good measure, throw on Apache so you can serve up files in a pinch. This is handy in case you need to move files around with a system that lacks secure shell for whatever reason. Just throw together a quickie page and use browsers to do all the transfers.

I keep all these tools on a single burned CD (with room to spare). They are the first things I put on any system I use. With this toolset, windows goes from a useless development platform to a slightly annoying development platform, which is better then nothing when your clients require windows on your desktop box.

This looks promising: VisualPerl plugin

If you can't handle notepad or edit, this looks like it'll combine the debugging and intellisense stuff in VS. Says its due out when VS7 comes out, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

BTW, on perl.com, there is always a link to the FAQ "Is there a Windows version of Perl?" right there on the left side of the main page.

Or did you mean, more like IndigoPerl? Perhaps you aren't aware that Perl has been available for Win32 systems for over four years, and that it's been ported to almost every other OS under the sun...

Or, more than likely, IHBT.

'Perl development kit' - use a text editor, I do. Zap for RISC OS has a nice 'Perl syntax colouring' mode, and EditPlus does the same for Windows. Oh, if you bothered to check Perl.com, you'll now that Perl is available for Win32, Macintosh, 'UNIX' and RISC OS. Perl is a very handy language to know, and it's quick and simple. I know the 2nd edition of 'The Camel' has came in very useful for me, but it's also good to check on other resources.
Richy C.
--

Okay, sounds nice. Only problem is, how do I run Perl in Windows?

It's called PerlScript.

Go to http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/Dow nload.html and download it for Windows (it's part of a whole load of other stuff).

WhiteRose, is written in C++, see This Page.
This is only the start of Freenet, you know these guys are going to tie it into Gnutella, Mojo and other systems so it's harder to stop. There's a Perl client available so people can setup Freenet access on their web pages, see FCRC so you should see web based access soon.
I see a Perl server coming someday soon.
For Windows Active State has ActivePerl, a FREE Perl interpreter, easy install. All you do is type the name of the perl program at a DOS window. Perl programs are easy to change, and docs come with the download.

Most of the Clients *will* work through a firewall, depending on how your sysadmin sets it up. So you should be able to access Freenet data OK.
There is a Perl client available so people can setup Freenet access on their web pages, see FCRC, so you should see web based access soon.
For Windows Active State has ActivePerl, a FREE Perl interpreter, easy install. All you do is type the name of the perl program at a DOS window. Perl programs are easy to change, and docs come with the download.
Other Clients are being developed and are available HERE.

They will probably have to change their product's name.

I see that it appears to be unrelated to the other VisualPython under development by Activestate. Looks like the lawyers will have fun on this one.

Too late! Activestate are doing it for them: Visual Perl and Visual Python will leverage Visual Studio 7.0.

The press release is here. ActiveState joined Microsoft's Visual Studio Integration Program. Visual Studio will contain a full-featured VB/VC++-like IDE. Visual Python will also be included.

That brings up a great point. I remember seeing the announcement of Visual Studio 7 incorporating Perl as a module at ActiveState. It looks like Microsoft is merely "allowing" this to be incorporated, and ActiveState is doing the work of building what amounts to a large plug-in.

I wonder if this just entails the things that facilitate using the IDE (e.g. syntax highlighting, debugging, etc.), or proprietary code modules ala MFC (Microsoft Fried Chicken?). I further wonder if the guts of this big Visual Studio plug-in will themselves be open-source, or will they be grabbed by Microsoft. The arrangement is not terrifically clear if you just read the press release.

Does anybody know the end game here?

-L

Rational is not taking over J++, they're just producing a Java compiler that will run inside the next Visual Studio, along with, as their press release even mentioned, "Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual J++." (Yet another reason not to rely on Slashdot headlines for your information, although at least they didn't claim that Rational was also taking over VB and VC++.) You should know that ActiveSt ate is doing the same thing, joining the VS Integration Program so that Perl and Python will be integrated with the next version of Visual Studio. (Oh, and it's kinda silly to say that J++ isn't in widespread use.)

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

Err... I for one always assumed that AOL's move to Linux will really just be a move to *Mozilla*, not another OS platform. People have to realize that Mozilla as it stands now is an *application platform*, as able (if not more so) than Java.

People can write whole Web-based applications in Mozilla. Look at Active State and Zope. AOL is smart enough to use this to their own advantage. Suddenly they got a version of AOL that can be deployed *over the network* to any PC or OS, w/o those pesky CDs. Added bonus: the main OS for testing this platform is (coincidentally, because of Netscape's incompetence) a *free* one, that they can do anything to.

Welcome back to the future: Mozilla is the VT100 of tomorrow :-)...



engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Visual Perl and Visual Python will be part of Visual Studio 7. Interesting because development tools are one of the good things MS makes. It would be interesting to see the color coding, drop-down object members, tree views of classes and functions, online help, and debugging applied to Perl. I wonder who will do the better job.

On activestate's homepage there is a link to a press release about Visual Perl and Visual Pyhon for MS Visual Studio 7.0

cristiana

From: http://Activ eState.com/Corporate/Media_Center/News/Press959150 636.html "We view Mozilla as a very exciting platform as it offers an open, modern component framework for cross-platform application development," stated Dr. David Ascher, Senior Developer and Mozilla Product Leader, ActiveState. "Our contributions to the Mozilla open source effort will start with adding Python and Perl bindings to XPCOM, Mozilla's component architecture. This change will open the Mozilla architecture and eventually make it available to Perl and Python programmers."
___

You don't have to use VB for ASP pages, you know. They work with any scripting language. Me, I use ActivePerl, which is a free scripting engine to allow the use of Perl with ASP. Try it!

1) IE has already one the browser war.

2) You can already use Perl to script HTML in webpages using Internet Explorer and ActiveState's ActivePerl for windows.
ActivePerl lets you use perl to write Windows Scripts, server side ASP Scripts and indeed, client side scripts inside HTML pages.

Windows' ActiveX Scripting engine and the level of componentisation in IE and Windows doesn't seem as stupid now does it?

ActiveState has been offering betas based on this software for nearly a month!

OK, OK, so they just released an earlier snapshot all packaged together. Same development series. And it was not a release candidate (meaning the developers were not prepared to call it a final release if nobody found any bugs).

But still. :-)

Cheers,
Ben

Couldn't you just use a small bit of JavaScript to pull the whole page from somewhere else?

Alternatively, you could use PerlScript and write the whole page in obfuscated Perl.

Now all we need is a web browser in under 5Kbyte.

I am not sure what you mean.

Certainly may places where VB variants are used, such as ASP, you can also use Perl.

Additionally with the appropriate modules Perl can drive things through OLE automation using the same APIs that VB uses.

But if what you want is a way to take a VB script and run it in Perl, I don't think so. Or to embed Perl inside of a VB application? That could also be hard. (ActiveState sells tools to make dlls and com servers out of Perl, allowing it to be called from within VB. Again I doubt that is what you want.) Sorry...

Ben

"In particular, we really needed to have a commercially packaged version of Perl for the Windows folks, because many of them were (and still are) clueless about open source. It's almost like we're doing Windows users a favor by charging them money for something they could get for free, because they get confused otherwise."

Try Activestate for your download. The clipboard module can easily be used to write a convenient utility to demoronize your html.

Oh right, and take a look at The Perl Power Tools. Put a few of those in your path and it may do something for your sanity.

OTOH you could just install Linux and look innocent... :-)

Cheers,
Ben

must mean ASP, & other proprietary compoonents...

Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.

The commercial BSD vendor, Berkeley Software Design, Inc., and Eric Allman's companym, Sendmail, Inc., share several characterics. (Note: I may be wrong about some of the following. Corrections welcome) They both started with free software. They both added proprietary enhancements. The both sell their value-added product as a revenue source. Both give you source code to the product you bought. And both forbid you from redistributing that source or changes to it to those who don't hold a licence.

Two critical questions are:

1. What's the current technology transfer? To what extend do corporate BSDI enhancements return to the free BSD distributions?
2. If these companies go down, what happens to their code? Licence holders still have the source, but so what? Is it dead?

To add one more pair of companies to the stack, consider John Ousterhout's TCL-based Scriptics company, or the Canadian Perl-related firm, ActiveState. My understanding is that there's more technology transfer between these two companies and their core free software roots than might be immediately obvious with the previous pair. I cannot really speak of the TCL world, but in the case of the Perl one, that firm funds not only the salary of the Perl release manager, they also fund development for porting to non-free systems. For example, they've made Perl's fork() call work "right" on Microsoft systems (actually, Microsoft paid for that work!) and have immediately returned those corporately funded enhancements back to the world of free software.

Yes, that means that the current developer release of Perl, version 5.005_63, supports fork(2) with Unix semantics even on Microsoft. Hurray!

If you want other mixed-mode business models, think about Alladin Ghostscript. The interesting issue of licensing is covered in the FAQ. There's also Sleepycat Software, whose database product, Berkeley DB, was used in Netscape with neither credit nor compensation, thus triggering a good bit of bad blood on the authors' parts because of lack of public recognition and appreciate for their work. The resulting `poison pill' licence seeks to avoid a repeat of this unpleasantry.

Now, we have in contrast to those situations, look at companies that are making a business, or trying to make a business, out of GPL'd software. The two most obvious examples, RHAT and LNUX, are hardly typical cases due to their current market valuations, which are obviously astronomically overvalued. But even in their cases, you'll find things that aren't what you would call "free software". In fact, they aren't even open source; look at the way Redhat ships "demo versions" of things without source. Now, I would be willing to argue that this is in fact a good thing because it shows people that Redhat's operating system is a viable platform for traditional licensed software. Others, however, dispute this, pointing out that that software would be orphaned if the company who produces it were to die.

My point is that I believe we now have a sufficiently long list of corporate endeavours which are based, at least with respect to some definitions of the term, free software. That means we have actual cases to look at, not hypothetical cases. I'm sure I've only named a couple of them here. What about other companies? I'm not talking about simple packagers and distributors. I mean firms that do serious development work based on free software. (I would mention Cygnus, but they've recently become an acquisition by Redhat.)

Do we have examples of companies that have died or otherwise abandoned their work in these areas? The university Ingress experience and Britten-Lee? Can we come up with other examples to look at? What has happened to the product of their work? Has it truly gone the way of all things, or did humanity derive some benefit from it?

ActiveState makes the majority of its cash from support contracts. See http://www.ActiveState.com/PerlDirect

I am totally unfamiliar with what the Qt (or equivalent for Gnome) toolkits provide. So, I realize this may be a totally inapplicable suggestion.

But, for certain types of "free GUI'd application" development, or at least prototyping, would using Perl plus Tk be at least somewhat applicable?

I know Perl is available for Win32 platforms (95/98/NT). You can get it from www.activestate.com. You can get Tk for Perl from the same place. You can get books on using Perl and Tk together from www.oreilly.com.

I'm certainly not going to claim this is a complete alternative for Qt, but might it work better (assuming what you want to do should be GUI'd) than ncurses?

--
Joseph R. Justice

If you were on p5p, I'm quite certain you wouldn't be joining the other Illuminati wannabes with these unsubstantiated delusions of evil conspiracies and take-overs. Please try to simmer down, and do a little research. You'll see that all is well. Or talk to one of us directly if you'd prefer.

--tom

Are there any Unix versions of PerlEx(TM)?

There are currently no PerlEx Unix versions available.

If you owe so much of your business to the open-source world, why not be considerate enough to point people to a solution which YOU begged the question to? Especially when your product does exactly the same thing as a free version that you stole liberally from and then you don't even bother to acknowledge it?

-off rant

Well if you have linux/unix or anything that supports perl...can someone port this to win95/dos...?

you can get perl for win32 at activestate

So, yeah, it runs on NT, but there are reasons for that. (even though that may be unthinkable to some /.ers, who obviously have never had to do a professional site on a tight budget and deadline)

Actually many /.ers have done exactly that. What do you think Slashdot is?

And a good chunk of the blame for any site instability goes to Perl and PerlEx (which manages to throw away 50MB every time it restarts an interpreter...

Without that.

...can someone please show ActiveState how to check for memory leaks?)

Submit bug reports to ActiveState, not a bunch of Slashdotters. What would we know about Perl anyway?

Besides, the PerlEx license reads, inter alia:

LIMITATIONS. You may not:
modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble (except to the extent applicable laws specifically prohibit such restriction), or create derivative works of (except as provided otherwise herein) the Software;
...

Source? Patches? Hah.

Jonathan