Or: how a dead email address sent me digging through 24 years of Perl history. A few months ago, the Perl community received some news. The PAUSE administrators were turning off the email forwarding service that had, for many years, allowed CPAN authors to receive email at addresses like DAVECROSS@cpan.org. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. The […]

The post The Long Life of WWW::Shorten first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Sometimes you design a system. And sometimes you make a series of vaguely related decisions over five years and eventually realise that, quite by accident, you’ve designed a system. I think I’ve just done the latter. Back in February 2021, Gabor Szabo wrote an article called Perl modules with their own web sites. He pointed […]

The post Accidentally Building a CPAN Web Platform first appeared on Perl Hacks.

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”— William Gibson I was reminded of that quote this week when I received a support request for a Perl CGI script I helped write about twenty-five years ago. If you’re a software developer, your immediate reaction is probably the same as mine was. “A […]

The post The Future Isn’t Evenly Distributed first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Every now and then I’m reminded of a technology from the early days of the web and wonder if I imagined it. This week, it was Mohammad using WebAssembly to run Perl in his browser. Which led to me thinking about PerlScript. If you’re a certain age, and you spent any time developing web applications […]

The post Remember PerlScript? When Internet Explorer Could Run Perl first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Back in 2020 I gave a pretty definitive statement of my position on physical books. When brian d foy interviewed me for perl.com, I said, among other things: “I do like a real book. But they take up too much space, so I’ve pretty much completely stopped buying them over the last five years.” That […]

The post Perl School Goes Paperback first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Back in January I wrote about App::HTTPThis, the tiny web server I seem to reach for whenever I need to share the contents of a directory over HTTP. It’s a deliberately simple tool, wrapping Plack::App::DirectoryIndex in a command-line interface that gets out of your way. This week, thanks to a blog post from Olaf Alders, […]

The post How One Pull Request Took App::HTTPThis to Version 1.0 first appeared on Perl Hacks.

A question came up recently in the Perl community asking whether, in a Mojolicious application, it’s better to use DBIx::Class or a Mojolicious-specific module like Mojo::Pg. It’s an interesting question, but I think it’s asking the wrong thing. I’ve spent almost forty years moving up the stack of database abstractions. Every few years, someone invents […]

The post Choosing the Right Database Abstraction first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Public Identifiers, UUIDs and a Tiny SEO Fix A recent question from my friend and colleague Mohammad got me thinking about the way we identify data in web applications. While working on the DBIC component of a REST API, he came across the term enumeration attack. In this type of attack, an attacker systematically guesses […]

The post Public Identifiers, UUIDs and a Tiny SEO Fix first appeared on Perl Hacks.

One of the more interesting additions I’ve made recently to the Line of Succession website is support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). If you’ve spent any time around AI tooling recently, you’ve probably seen people talking about MCP. It’s often described as “USB for AI”, which is perhaps a little overblown, but the basic […]

The post Teaching AI About the British Monarchy with MCP first appeared on Perl Hacks.

One of the defining characteristics of a good programmer is an instinct for keeping implementation details in the correct layer of an application. That sounds abstract, but it turns out to explain a huge amount of the progress we’ve made in software development over the last twenty-five years. And nowhere is that clearer than in […]

The post The Long Road from CGI to Containers first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Every month, I write a newsletter which (among other things) discusses some of the technical projects I’ve been working on. It’s a useful exercise — partly as a record for other people, but mostly as a way for me to remember what I’ve actually done. Because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s very easy to […]

The post Summarising a Month of Git Activity with Perl (and a Little Help from AI) first appeared on Perl Hacks.

Every so often, a new data serialisation format appears and people get excited about it. Recently, one of those formats is **TOON** — Token-Oriented Object Notation. As the name suggests, it’s another way of representing the same kinds of data structures that you’d normally store in JSON or YAML: hashes, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and […]

The post Writing a TOON Module for Perl first appeared on Perl Hacks.