YAPC::Europe - Day 3 (25 July 2003)

09:00
Developing and distributing Perl applications for Microsoft platforms
Now my normal use of Microsoft platforms extends about as far as opening an X session to a UNIX box, but I still got quite a lot out of this talk. For a start there was discussion of the wxPerl GUI toolkit and the wxGlade GUI builder, whereas I've only really used Perl/Tk for GUI applications. Next on the agenda were tools for compiling and distributing Perl programs. The PAR (Perl ARchive) system looks good - it takes a Perl script, works out all the dependencies, and compiles the lot into a single (although large) executable. And it's multi-platform, so can be used just as well on UNIX systems.

13:25
CPAN
Well everyone knows what the CPAN is, or do they? Elane Ashton's talk covered the history and structure of the CPAN, PAUSE, mirrors, and the search engines. We were then given various tips about how to create module distributions that will keep the CPAN consistent, and some of the common mistakes to avoid, such as missing sections of POD and malformed version numbers. Elaine finished up by looking at ways to deal with making updates to modules where the original author cannot be contacted.

14:30
OODoc - Object Oriented Documentation
One of yesterday's talks, 'Mail::Box Tutorial - Mail Filters', touched on a very impressive documentation system which drew a lot of attention. This talk gave a full rundown of that system, OODoc, which is an extension to POD to add logical markup (as opposed to visual), templates, and support for object orientation (e.g. displaying inheritance structures or indexing a multi-module distribution).

15:20
Lightning talks
Hosted by MJD, we were treated to an amazing 17 different talks in 90 minutes. Among the highlights were Nick Clark's talk (for effective use of London.pm as props), BooK's talk (for the most amusing slides), and Beatnik's talk (for getting 'irate lesbians' into a computing conference!). Great stuff from all who presented.

17:00
Auction
Well no people were sold this time (almost - we did pay to find out an 'interesting' fact about Greg McCarroll by running some obfuscated code on the projection screen...), and a staggering EUR1371 was paid to change the official language of the London.pm and Paris.pm websites to Esparanto!

19:00
Beer. Perl. Beer. Karoke. Beer. Whiskey. Loud noises.

04:00
Sleep (at last...)