London Perl Workshop 2007

Posted on December 1, 2007

These are a few notes I’ve taken during the presentations I attended at the 2007 edition of the London Perl Workshop.

Scaling with memcached (Leon Brocard [acme])

  • Don’t underestimate the fact that this is a cache, not a database –can’t dump, can’t iterate over keys, not persistant, not redundant, etc.
  • TTL is good, invalidation is bad (which means things will get out of date)
  • Tuning is done with TTL, cache sizes
  • Uses memory, not so much CPU
  • Easily distributed (over servers, CPUs, etc)
  • Limits set by default are small, change them!

Catalyst quick start (Matt Trout)

  • Not a “do it fast” approach to stuff, a bit more work to get started, but supposedly better at tackling your problem
  • cpan Catalyst::Devel
  • App scaffolding: catalyst.pl Project - very basic…

Catalyst is basically just a component loader and a URI dispatcher

  • UTF8 out-of-the-box (DBIx::Class may be helpful)

Controllers (URI dispatching)

  • :Local, :Global, :Regex, :LocalRegex
  • :Chained -> powerful enough to implement almost everything else…

Models

  • DBIx
  • Not the point of this tutorial, JFGI

Views

  • Template Toolkit is widely used
  • HTML::Mason (ouch!)
  • HTML::Template (too simple for most stuff?)

Deployment

  • mod_perl is OK, but probably overkill
  • FastCGI is perfect for new stuff that only uses Catalyst