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Anyway, this fixation with understanding the Perl 5 internals, and
especially the Perl 5 compiler, (due to yet another of my Perl
influences, the great Malcolm Beattie) led to quite a torrent of
modules, from L<ByteCache>, an implementation of just-in-time
compilation for Perl modules, through L<B::Flags> and L<B::Tree> to help
visualising the Perl op tree, to L<uninit>, L<B::Generate>, L<optimizer>
and L<B::Utils> for modifying it.

=head2 Perl About The House

Now we abandon chronological order somewhat and take a look at the
various areas in which I've used Perl. One of these areas has been the
automation of everyday life: checking my bank balance with
L<Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB> (the first Perl module to interface to
personal internet banking, no less) and my phone bill with a release of
Tony Bowden's L<Data::BT::PhoneBill>. 

L<Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB> was meant to go with L<Finance::QIF>, my
Quicken file parser, to produce another now-abandoned idea, a Perl
finances manager. It seemed that I'm only capable of producing modules,
not full standalone applications - or at least, it seemed that way until
I produced L<Bryar>, my blogging software, based on the concepts from
Rael Dornfest's C<blosxom> and beginning my adventures with Andy
Wardley's Template Toolkit. Bryar also tuned me in to the
Model-View-Controller framework idea, of which more later.

Another project I briefly played with was a personal robot, using the
C<Sphinx>/C<Festival> speech handling and recognition modules from
Cepstral and Kevin Lenzo. I didn't have X10, so I couldn't shout
"lights" into the air in a wonderfully scifi way, but I could shout
"mail" and have a summary of my inbox read to me, "news" to get the
latest BBC news headlines, and "time" to hear the time. Of course,

OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

scenario. I was writing a module (C<Safety::First>) which provided
additional built-in-like functions for Perl to encourage and facilitate
defensive programming and intelligible error reporting. ("Couldn't open
file? Why not?") These built-ins had to be available from every
package, which meant playing with C<UNIVERSAL::AUTOLOAD>. But what if
another package was already using C<UNIVERSAL::AUTOLOAD>? Hence,
C<Sub::Versive> wrapped it in a pre-hook. Of course, with the
interesting bit of the problem solved, C<Safety::First> was abandoned.

L<Class::Dynamic> was an interesting attempt to provide support for code
references in C<@ISA>, analogous to code references in C<@INC>. It
works, but of course I could never find any practical use for it.

L<Class::Wrap> was written as a lazy profiler. A certain application I
was writing for my employer of the time, Kasei, made use of the (IMHO
evil) C<Mail::Message> module. How do we isolate all calls to that
class? There are plenty of modules out there for instrumenting
individual methods, including of course C<Sub::Versive>. But the whole
class? C<Class::Wrap> takes a wonderfully brute-force but workable
approach to the problem. A real profiler, however, can be constructed
from L<Devel::DProfPP>, which is sort of a profiler toolkit.

OneHundredNotOut.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

C<CGI::Untaint> with a bunch of extra patterns while at Kasei and
afterwards, including L<CGI::Untaint::ipaddress>,
L<CGI::Untaint::upload> and L<CGI::Untaint::html>, 
I also wrote a whole plethora of C<CDBI> extensions:
L<Class::DBI::AsForm>, L<Class::DBI::Plugin::Type>,
L<Class::DBI::Loader::GraphViz> (reflecting my penchant for data
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