Weblogs for ajt

Last week we went live with a revised EDI process we have with one customer. The original process has been running since I started my job - how to implement it was an interview question - but it's been running on a Windows box. Our IT department wanted to decommission the box so I took the opportunity to port the application from Windows to Linux.

It's still a Perl application but the new one has better logging and configuration. It's been live for a few days and so far it's working perfectly well. It'll be a real shame when it's finally replaced with a vast SAP PI middleware framework, but in the mean time an awful lot of money has flowed through that simple Perl application!

Today I'm performing some minor enhancements to a hardware interface I wrote some time ago. The program isn't a perfect example of object orientated bliss, with automated regression tests, but it's a fairly cleanly written procedural program that is divided into subroutines, however it's not to hard to maintain.

Padre has made it into Debian Squeeze (testing). This is good as I can now test it without having to do a custom install. So far on my desktop system it looks okay, but on my notebook (cleaner KDE install) it looks much better. It seems to integrate with KDE4 okay and looks nice, the display is a bit sluggish to update but it looks like it's worth investigating.

When I say it's sluggish, I mean it scrolls slowly, but that doesn't mean it's any slower than Eclipse or Komodo. It does start a lot faster than the other IDEs though.

Yesterday was the 2009 London Perl Workshop. It was a really good day. There were lots of extremely well presented talks on a wide range of topics. Hats off to the London.pm for yet again organising a fantastic event.

I've been on a SAP PI Mapping course this week. It's not been the best experience, because Feltham station isn't reachable because of major problem with a railway bridge caused by the recent weather - and I suppose decades of poor maintainance. That's not SAP's fault but it doesn't make for happy bunnies...

The course has been quite interesting. We have been using the PI tool for about 12 months now to map XML files to plain text files (on the whole). Every interface we map does seem painful & awkward and we had just assumed it was our lack of experience with the tool. Having been on the mapping course, I now think that it's just a dificult task to do and it's not us afterall.

It's not managment friendly but it would be a damn site faster and more reliable to do all the mapping in Perl...

This week I've been drawing out our system interfaces in Visio. It's an annoying tool, I'm sure there are better but the diagrams are now done.

Very scary stuff, interfacing, lots of data going in/out and all over the place. At least the interfaces written in Perl are fast and reliable, you can't say the same for the Java ones...

It's not that I hate Java, it's just that the Java examples we have are not the best in the world. Mind you I've yet to see a well written Java application that is fast, stable and fully featured...

While I like this site it does have a comment spam infestation. One of my articles here has had over 100 spam comments since I published it. I believe that the most recent version of YAWNS now contains more effective anti-spam measures, perhaps it's worth investigating and upgrade...?

Today has been an excellent LUG meeting at IBM Hursley. We had lots of talks and they were all very good. I gave a brief "Book Reviewing" talk and managed to give away all my APress books for review. I told people that I'm expecting more from APress and O'Reilly in the future but I suspect they publishers' would like to see reviews of the first wave first.

I mentioned that O'Reilly are doing a limited trial of cheap PDF Perl books, and I'm getting emails from people asking about the discount code. It's good to see people giving O'Reilly a go with their PDF books, and better still they are Perl books that people are interested in.

Good/cheap books are like buses, you wait for an age then several turn up at once.

At the moment I'm swamped with Apress books for reviewing. I'm hoping to farm most out next Saturday at a LUG meeting, but even so it's still a lot of reviewing...

Then brian d foy announces cheap Perl ebooks (no DRM) from O'Reilly!

Today I spent most of the day trying to write some Java code using the Eclipse IDE. It's fair to say I don't do Java or Eclipse and it was very much a hunt and click experiment, even so it was painfully slow to get anything done. No wonder Jave code is slow if it takes a day to get "Hello World" out of the door, it's no wonder that SAP PI is so painfully slow if it's all been written in Java!

Before anyone complains, this isn't just a mindless rant, I'm well aware that if I'd had a little help it probably wouldn't have been as bad, I'm just pointing out the complexity of Eclipse and Java relative to Perl...

Once I've got more familiar with the tool and the language it probably won't be too bad, well I hope it won't seem as painful...!