When I started writing this article it was going to be about the choice of language people use when they create a quick dirty script for say a one off task. For this type of thing I tend to find myself using Perl and since I thought Perl was maybe a little old in the tooth, I wondered what the “cool kids” were using these days. However, this got me thinking more about the benefits of such scripts both to the programmer and their employer.

The MySQL Master-Master replication (often in active-passive mode) is popular pattern used by many companies using MySQL for scale out. Most of the companies would have some internal scripts to handle things as automatic fallback and slave cloning but no Open Source solution was made available.

Programming languages with thin and fat variables and what it means.

As we were investigating the user statistics on the Koders site, we noticed a significant increase in the number of language-specific searches for Ruby code. Ruby is now the fourth most searched language behind Java, C/C++, C#. The number of Ruby-specific searches has increased by about 20x since Koders first started counting in 2004 and Ruby has decisively surged ahead of PHP, Python and Perl. This is quite interesting because it is widely known how much PHP code is out there running web sites and the like.

Constraints enables business rules to be enforced by the database instead of via application code. Through the judicious use of constraints, application and SQL coding can be minimized and data integrity can be maximized. Constraints may be applied to columns in the form of uniqueness requirements, relational integrity constraints to other tables/rows, allowable values and data types.For example, a column containing a product price should probably only accept positive values. But there is no standard data type that accepts only positive numbers. Another issue is that you might want to constrain column data with respect to other columns or rows. For example, in a table containing product information, there should be only one row for each product number.

You know that a conference is good when you go home with a list of stuff that you never heard of but now need to go follow up on. The JVM Language Summit was exceptional in this regard.

Guide to build a "true" comet application, a real-time web chat, with Meteor Comet server

Flash (AS3), haXe, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, and Python ports of my continuous shuffled sequence algorithm. (0-clause BSD)

Which is more important: time to write the program or time to run the program?

This article discusses writing cool DSL's in Perl/Ruby ! Check it out !

The saga continues with basic web scraping in Ruby/Perl .

This is the first of a series dedicated to scripting languages ( mostly perl & ruby ) .The first one is about ruby's method_missing and perl's equivalent .

According to this google trends analysis Redhat, Centos and Fedora make up the majority of linux distributions used in production. All these have a broken perl. How much time and money has been lost because of this? I have a sinking feeling that it is a staggering number.

The BuildingBrowsergames blog has had a long series of entries showing how to build an online game. Each entry has thus far been completed first in PHP and then again using Perl. This is my blog entry which has an overview and key for the entire series of postings and it serves as an announcement that I've started converting all the entries over to Ruby on Rails as well.

It’s not true, of course. There are a still large number of large companies who love Perl. I could probably work through to my retirement enhancing and extending systems that are written in Perl at many of the big banks in the City of London. There are, however, also many companies who are moving away from Perl for a number of reasons. Here’s one of the reasons that will be included in my talk.

When you say “scripting language” these days, most programmers think of Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, ASP, or JavaScript. But the history of scripting languages starts much earlier than any of these.

There are few things that aren’t better once salt has been added, and encryptions are no different. Adding a salt can make a simple encryption exponentially harder to break/crack. Thankfully, there are many other available encryption options that include salt, and the best part about adding salt to your encryption is how easily it can be done.

Libraries like Java's Collections API contain numerous algorithms tuned to give good performance in a theoretical 'typical case', but it can be very easy to forget that these algorithms aren't magical, and have certain requirements of their own if that goal is to be achieved.

Performance comparison between a few languages for a simple parse and load database task.

The Scripting languages are deployed in many operative systems, either in UNIX/Linux or Windows. These languages are developed for general purpose process automation and web programming. But you can consider using them for the software development process in many ways. Among these languages, awk and Perl are suitable for automate and speed up software development for embedded systems, because many embedded systems only have cross tool chain, without powerful IDE supports for process automation. Here I will show you why we need them and how these tools help us.

Almost half of the Resumes I get to interview on Swing, write: “Swings” instead of “Swing”. They don’t seem to do the same mistake with other technologies. I Wonder why.

5 web development techniques to prevent Google from crawling your HTML forms. do you really want Googlebot messing around in your HTML forms? Probably not. But prepare, because other (not so polite bots) are coming!

I’ve been taking DDJ for a couple years now. It’s cheap and occasionally has something interesting in it, but it’s been less interesting than I remember it being when I read it in college. I’ve been much more enamored with the Communciations of the ACM. Today, I received my issue and there’s an interview with Paul Jansen of TIOBE Software.

I had a fair amount of email from people, and saw some blogs, complaining about the fact that Google App Engine currently supports Python only. On the video, and in the docs, it is frequently mentioned that other languages are to come, and that the infrastructure itself is language neutral. We have to start somewhere! I personally have a slight Ruby preference, but there is a funny thing about Python.

Coding Horror makes its traffic stats publicly available. Unfortunately just the last 500 records are available. I wrote a program to accumulate search keywords and analyzed the data later. Project uses Perl, SQLite and Google Charts.