Whatever Fits queries: "We are trying to integrate our own specialized development environment. We are currently using Visual Studio and the add-in feature of that, but would like to get away from the Microsoft tax and have had to rewrite our software from scratch for reasons outside this scope. The current project includes adding specialized features to the IDE to handle our project types, extra tool-windows for user interaction, and an external process to run the compiled code. The compiled language is even open for debate right now, but would have to be something rather common or easy to learn. I really want to try to run Perl with SOAP for our backend. This is going to run on Windows systems but I am hoping to go for something cross platform for future extensibility if possible. What IDEs can be recommended that offer this kind of extensibility and keep the price per copy reasonable? I have a small list already built, but I have no experience with any of these but Visual Studio and would like to hear both success and horror stories of integration."

gigawattwarlock asks: "As an almost new Mac OS X user (I've been adminning my wife's Mac for a while now), I am used to writing Perl scripts for her Mac, which work just fine. Simply put, I have become spoiled with the GTk bindings for Perl on Linux. I love being able to use and abuse a robust GUI, quickly and easily. And to make matters worse, I find the Aqua interface near addictive ... enough so that the idea of installing another desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, et. al) just seems a little silly, and a bit of overkill, to me. Does anyone know if there are any perl bindings in the works for Mac OS X or maybe even an already existent alternative graphical library or interface within Mac OS X?"

Simon Cozens writes "The Apocalypses are Larry Wall's explanation of the design of Perl 6. In Apocalypse 5, Larry turns to redesigning regular expressions. He set out to intentionally 'break' a lot of the regular expression culture we're all used to, and these are the results - and they're mindblowing."

gnat writes "The IT Director for Weta Digital, Peter Jackson's company doing the digital effects for the Lord of the Rings movies, is keynoting at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. They use a ton of Linux and Perl." FWIW I believe Hemos and I are speaking too, but I'm much more interested in seeing this LotR thing.

Fastball asks: "I have a couple ideas for some web-based games that I'd like to develop. I'm an avid Linux, Perl, Apache, and MySQL user, and I believe in the GPL. However, I'm trying to figure out how I can develop these games as open source and still make a buck. It would be rewarding to produce them without seeing a profit, but I'd like to make enough money to get a company going and quit my current, uninspiring job. Can I get there via open source, would I be more profitable going closed source, or should I forget about make money altogether?"

Suffering Sekret Keys asks: "When I first started working for the company I'm with now, back in 1996, I was charged with finding a way to keep our customer credit card info secure in our database. Now that I'm smart enough to realize the flaws in this system, I am wondering how you avoid the catch-22 of needing to be able to encrypt/decrypt the data on the same machine that houses it, without exposing a secret key that could make that data more vulnerable in the event of an intrusion?" This question has been submitted a few times, recently, but this was the best one out of the lot. It seems many of you are wisely concerned about private data stored on your company's net, and the risks involved if it gets stolen. Well, now is your chance to discuss various solutions. How would you securely store your customer's private information, especially when it comes to critical pieces like credit card numbers?

mbadolato writes "use Perl; is reporting that the long-awaited Perl 5.8 has just been released in the form of RC1. It is a release candidate, and is not recommended for use in a production environment, but downloading and testing is strongly encouraged. Read the story for the announcement, and also read perldelta to see what's changed." I think this might be the best .0 release in Perl 5's history, and is will also be the first release of perl to ship with full support for Mac OS X (perl 5.6.1 had a few nagging issues), as well as Classic Mac OS.

Friend of perl developers everywhere, Jeremy Zawodny, has an intriguing question: "If you had to explain to Microsoft why they should change their attitude toward Open Source, what would you say?" For more about this, read on...

Ryan writes "Apple recently published an article on using CVS with Mac OS X. 'This article covers some of the most commonly used features of CVS, with emphasis on using CVS with static and interpreted web files (HTML, PHP, Perl, etc).'" It's a decent article, a good primer on how to get started, and it's nice that Mac OS X comes with a CVS server. Personally, I really dig maccvs for my CVS client, and there are plenty of other clients for Mac OS out there too.

blake213 writes "Newsfactor is reporting a story on how WiFi Metro and Green Packet are teaming up to do a 90-day field test of combined WiFi and cellular romaing technologies in the S.F. Bay Area. Supposedly a user can roam between two coverage areas with uninterrupted service."

ClickNMix writes: "The latest version of PHP has been released here. With improved DomXML and Apache 2 support in with the usual bug fixes and improvements." There is still no production support for PHP or for that matter mod_perl in Apache 2.0 yet though.

GonzoJohn writes: "Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller for Linux Orbit: 'If you have followed GNU/Linux for the last few years you know that GNOME has long been a stronghold of C, Perl and Python GUI programming. With Ximian's work on Mono, C# seems also to be a language that will see wide use in GNOME. Sun's involvement should also make Java applications integrate strongly with GNOME. But what about C++? Even in the GNU/Linux and Unix world this language has received many advocates and developers. I sat down with Murray Cumming, lead developer on the gtkmm and gnomemm C++ bindings for GTK+ and GNOME to get some information on the status of C++ development in GNOME.'Read the Interview."

mbadolato writes "Use.perl is running an interview with Larry Wall and Damian Conway, in which they answer questions about Perl 6. Questions were selected by the ten highest rated questions posed by readers last week."

zmcgrew writes "From Daemon News:
"The decision was made to remove Perl from the FreeBSD -current base system [earlier story ]. Perl will be supported as a port that the user can install after the base installation, however it will no longer be required. Mark Murray put out a call to the -current mailing list asking for volunteers to port all Perl scripts in the base system to another language, such as sh or C. All critical programs are already being ported, with only a few minor ones left to be claimed." Wow..."

mtve writes: "Have you ever seen source code that is valid on four languages: Perl, C, Befunge, and BrainF*ck? During last Perlgolf season famous Perl hacker Jérôme Quelin submit such inconceivable masterpiece and now he published expanded explanation of his solution. Caution: that text can hurt your mental health. Play Perlgolf!"

Slashback -- another round of updates and errata for your reading pleasure follows. So read on for more information on spambots, Flash memory for your slightly-outdated Apple systems, Linux (not quite) running on the GP32, publicity (including a security problem) from Mozilla, and more.

forged writes "The Register already reported Alan Cox's involvement against the proposed European Union Copyright Directive before. Today, Alan Cox has issued a wake up call to the Linux community amid concerns that the pending EUCD could stymie open source development. "The directive, which was approved last year, extends European copyright legislation so that it is even more restrictive than America's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."" If you haven't joined the EFF (or the equivalent in your country) , now might be a good time.

Reader Cole Tucker writes with this review: "The Ruby Developer's Guide was written with the intent to provide an overview of Ruby tools used for developing real-world applications. The book touches on a variety of areas, from GUI development to neural networks, and discusses existing Ruby packages that developers can take advantage of. In the end, the book comes out as a Ruby version of the Perl Cookbook." To see what he means by that, read on below for the rest of Cole's assessment of this book.

linderdm queries: "I am a perl web programmer who has taken a new job that requires me to do web 'programming' using XML, XSL, and Oracle XSQL. My minor experience with XSL so far has been horrible! It is so hard to do things that were very easy in Perl (looping!?!) and just seems incredibly verbose. I am curious to find out what the Slashdot community's experience has been with web programming in procedural languages (Perl, Java, etc) then switching to tag based XML/XSL. Am I wrong to be trying to do procedural programming with XSL?"

Misha writes "There have been a number of weeks/months in anyone's life that called for a better organization of your Inbox. filtering and folders work, but it'd be nice to have an text-mining tool running in the background that categorized incoming messages by topic as they arrive. It's nice to see that besides NLP research, there are some great algorithmic advances being done, as seen in this paper. Perhaps even one of them Perl monkeys will quickly hack such a background tool." Note: it's a PostScript file.