Following the blog post and proposal from Matt Trout, I’m going to aim to push out some posts on my uses and experiences of perl.  I’m extraordinarily unlikely to hit the Ironman rating since a look back at my history shows the occaisional year between posts :-)

Anyhow, as an ancient perl user (I pulled a perl release from usenet back sometime around 1988/89), I have quite a lot of odds of perl around, although mostly I have been pretty good at retiring the stuff that has outstayed its useful life.  In recent years there have been 2 main threads of work I have been doing with perl:-

1. Stuff related to my day job - mostly a combination of glue code and some overall product management code.
2. Theatre back office applications - ie website management and backstage allocation/management.

The 2 sets of code actually share a considerable amount of ideas - I tend to take more risks with the theatre code, and often pull ideas from there into work code.  However in both cases there is core of stuff that is based around DBIx::Class and to a lesser extent Catalyst.

The next few posts are going to outline the theatre code in particular - what the requirements were and how I went about implementing them.  There is a degree of history there - its been an incremental addition of functionality over several years, and if I were starting from scratch I may well not end up with the same system now, but it works and I am reasonably happy with it (although I have plans to improve it further as time allows).