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OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

diversity of modules that I've produced is a good indication of the
diversity of what can be done with Perl.

Let's begin, then, with some humble beginnings, and then catch up on
recent history.

=head2 The Embarrassing Past

Contrary to popular belief, I was not always a CPAN author. I started
writing modules in 1998, immediately after reading the first edition of
the Perl Cookbook - yes, you can blame Nat and Tom for all this. The
first module that I released was L<Tie::DiscoveryHash>, since I'd just
learnt about tied hashes. As with many of my modules, it was an integral
part of another software project which I actually never finished, and
now can't find. 

The first module that I ever B<wrote> (but, by a curious quirk of fate,
precisely the fiftieth module I released) was called L<String::Tokeniser>,
which is still a reasonably handy way of getting an iterator over
tokenising a string. (Someone recently released C<String::Tokenizer>,
which makes me laugh.) This too was for an abortive project, C<webperl>,

OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

I hate web programming. HTML is boring, CGI is boring, and I tried
avoiding it for as long as I could. This stopped when I worked for
Oxford University, handling their webmail service, which lead to
L<Bundle::WING>. Also at Oxford, I had to work with C<AxKit>, which
caused me innumerable headaches but I finally got some working XSP
applications written, not without writing the
L<Apache::AxKit::Language::XSP::ObjectTaglib> and
L<AxKit::XSP::Minisession> helper modules. I also did some playing
around with C<mod_perl>, thanks to the rather wonderful I<mod_perl
Cookbook>, and came up with L<Apache::OneTimeURL> when, during a
particularly paranoid phase, I wanted to give out my physical address
in URLs that would self-destruct after a single reading.

After leaving, though, I discovered the C<Class::DBI>/Template Toolkit
pair which has dominated my web programming since then. If you haven't
played with these two modules yet, you really need to, since they
work so well together, and with other modules like C<CGI::Untaint>, that 
they simplify so much of web and database work. I extended
C<CGI::Untaint> with a bunch of extra patterns while at Kasei and
afterwards, including L<CGI::Untaint::ipaddress>,

OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

visualization), and L<Class::DBI::Loader::Relationship>, which applies
the "as simple as possible and a bit simpler" approach to defining data
relationships.

The whole culmination of C<CDBI>, TT, and all these other technologies
came when I sat down and wrote L<Maypole>, a Model-View-Controller
framework with, again, emphasis on making things very simple to get
working. The Perl Foundation's sponsorship of Maypole development has
been one of the proudest achievements in my CPAN career, and lead not
only to a stonking big manual, loads of examples, but also
L<Maypole::Authentication::UserSessionCookie> and L<Maypole::Component>.

Template Toolkit and XML came back together again in a recent project
where I've had render some XML as part of a Maypole application.
Amazingly, there wasn't an XSLT filter for the Template Toolkit, so
L<Template::Plugin::XSLT> was born.

=head2 Games, Diversions and Toys

It was only when I got back from Japan that I learnt to play Go. How
stupid was that. For a year I had access to some of the best Go clubs