Random thoughts

vienna.js, the Vienna JavaScript User Group meeting was held tonight at Metalab. Attendance wasn’t bad considering that it’s summer holiday season and lots of folks wouldn’t be in Vienna at this time of the year.

First, Matti Paksula from the University of Helsinki gave a mini-talk about SVG and JavaScript. Matti pointed out that canvas was unsuitable for shapes, “it’s for bitmaps, it’s not accessible, and it doesn’t scale”. Canvas isn’t all bad though; a combination of HTML 5, JavaScript, canvas and SVG is needed to replace Flash. (That probably means that Flash will be around for a while, despite the lack of support from some devices starting with an “i”.)

Demonstrations included the Canvas to SVG conversions and back as shown at SVG Open 2009, and a sneak preview on the latest version which runs completely client-side. Matti also mentioned the PottisJS SVG prototype library and showed an interactive SVG demo.

Next, Roland Schütz talked about JavaScript code management, specifically how to structure code and source files, implement an efficient workflow and automate the building (and testing) of JavaScript code. Roland mentioned a few nice tools for coding and testing JavaScript source code:

• gema general macro processor for pre-processing source files
• JSLint for code quality and consistency checks (for quick tests the online version of JavaScript Lint is quite useful, too)
• phpcpd to detect duplicate code
• Selenium for Web application testing

Roland welcomes followers on his newly created Twitter feed @rolandschuetz.

Finally, Lars Dieckow delivered an impromptu talk entitled “Sommerloch” about–Perl :-). More than fifteen years after the release of Perl 5.000, Perl 6 is just around the corner and the Rakudo Star release will be available from the usual sources starting tomorrow.

As a long time Perl programmer–the first Perl programs I touched were Perl 4 code and I am pretty sure there are some &function calls around still in code we use today–I hadn’t closely followed the development of Perl 6, and it was good to get an update on enhancements and changes in Perl 6 and a live demo of some of the new features after the talk.

Labels: events, javascript, perl, webdevelopment

Looping over a list of two values in Perl with for or foreach would seem trivial. What if the code suddenly appears stuck at the first value? That's exactly what happened with the Perl script below:

my $PROTOCOL = 'http';
for $PROTOCOL (qw(http https)) {
   dosomething();
}

sub dosomething {
   print "$PROTOCOL\n";
}

Even with use strict and warnings turned on, the script runs without warnings, but rather than printing http and https in sequence, it prints http twice!

As it turns out, after much debugging (the sample code is stripped down from a larger script which actually does something useful) and collectively scratching heads, this is indeed the documented behavior:

The foreach loop defaults to scoping its index variable dynamically in the manner of local. However, if the index variable is prefixed with the keyword my, or if there is already a lexical by that name in scope, then a new lexical is created instead.

Lessons learned:

1. After a decade of hacking Perl code, there's always something new to learn (and use strict doesn't stop the programmer from getting the scoping wrong).
2. Reading the documentation (sometimes) helps.
   

Labels: perl, technology