Top perl Modules of 2006
I was thinking about writing a list of the perl modules that I used most often, liked best or somehow used. Some are golden oldies, others are new this year. There is no order in the list, so no Top 10 or anything.
DBIx::DWIW this is a module that helps writing database code. It contains methods for retrieving data and executing query's. It removes almost all of the repetitive database coding work. It's nice to be able to subclass and create a file with the configuration of the databases.
With all this niceness there are also a few hairy parts to this module. Especially when using it in a web environment. The 'verbose' statements are printed to STDOUT, which will result in 500 Internal server errors. The logging itself is really useful, but could use some work still.
File::Slurp, this is one of those modules that will make you really lazy. You provide a new and the functions of this module will write or read them. Not much more to be said.
use File::Slurp qw/read_file/; my $text = read_file('config.yml');POE, this is of course more of a framework for creating applications than just one module. There is much to be found in
POEnamespace. When you're creating network applications are daemons this is the place where you should start your search. POE has many different modules that can be reused. Creating networking applications has never been easier.YAML, I think more programs should use yaml. It has many different uses: config file, data transfer between applications. You could use it where you would normally use XML. But yaml is more consise and humand readable and writable. I use it for config files and my blogging software uses it as an index to all the different blog entries.
svk, not an actual perl module, but still a great perl application.
plagger, the perl rss aggregator.