Article up, and also: exegesis and code analysis/understanding

My first article kinda-sorta based on an exegetical approach (of my own prototype code) is up on the Vivtek site, and the six-day code rush to write code to build the article from a note database has really whetted my appetite for more of the same. There are all kinds of exegetical efforts I want to make, getting into code reading in a big way.

So I trolled around Google for salient things. Here's a list of interesting things.

• TipsForReadingCode at c2.com was quite helpful as a set of ... well, tips for reading code.
• Code comprehension tools at grok2.com; the vast majority of this class of tool is closed-source and rather expensive. I think this is largely because large codebases are not typical for open source projects, but rather enterprise code, and enterprises have the money to pay for expensive tools. That's my reading, anyway. But:
• cscope is a venerable tool for static analysis of C code, anyway, and has been perverted to handle other large-scale grep-like analyses of large numbers of files. The tool itself may or may not be something I'm interested in, but its approach is probably pretty valid.
• cflow is another flow dependency analysis tool, also open source.
• Perl is, as always, a special case.
• Well, what about static code analysis in general? Here's another list of tools.
• There's a clang-based analyzer.
• This moribund project on code "aspects" looks fascinating.
• Finally, a book on pattern-based OO refactoring, which also looks pretty fascinating.

So, as always, lots of people are doing things tangentially related to what I want to do, but nothing is 100% there - because what I want to do is an extract-then-literate-programming kind of thing. We'll see how much sense this approach makes. Wish me luck.

Article: Perl and Windows UAC

New article written on the Vivtek site, a little in-depth investigation of Windows UAC and how to manipulate it from Perl, along with the release of a CPAN module.

Article: KeePass through SSL with Perl

New article at the Vivtek site on accessing KeePass using the KeePass plugin from Perl. I ran through progressively more elegant prototypes before coming up with a nice wrapper. I released the whole shebang as a CPAN module WWW::KeePassRest, which uses a new JSON API wrapper that is ... minimalistic in its design.

It'd be nice to be nice and principled about API wrappers on something like this basis, but that's definitely way down the priority list.

Article: TRADOS 2007 and its language codes

I wrote a technical article for the Vivtek site today for the first time since 2009. I had to rewrite the publication system for the whole site to make that work, too. Very instructive!

Anyway, it's the saga of building a useful tool for my technical translation business. It's just a prototype; eventually I'll wrap it all up into a nice module and write another article on that.

First part of my CPAN Web API client survey article

A Survey of Web API client code on CPAN

Why a survey? And how do you start?

For the past few years, I've organized most of my thinking on Blogger – I first got into it while keeping various friends posted on my efforts with house renovation, and it just kind of stuck. Now I tend to start a new blog for every project I undertake. At some point (actually, on December 17, 2011) I had the bright idea that I should be able to do my task management right in Blogger as well, perhaps by the simple expedient of typing a title like "Task: do XXX" right into a blog post.

Earlier that day, I had realized that Blogger has an API, and suddenly, it was obvious how to proceed with this plan. I needed to write a Web API client to build my task indexer.

But like nearly everything I do, I was beset by the sudden fear that I might do it wrong. Maybe I'd be making assumptions I'd regret. Maybe other people were doing it better. (Note to self: this is why you never get anything done.)

I've got very little time to work on side projects – two teenagers, a full-time freelance translation business, and the aforementioned house renovation project make sure of that – so essentially everything technical is on the back burner, and so this one stayed as well, while I chewed on my fear. Occasionally in an off-moment I'd hit CPAN and look for modules that implemented other API clients, and I'd wonder what sorts of functionality might be nice in a more general Web API client support module. Finally, I just started scanning down the list of modules a search returned for "RESTful API", with the vague idea of doing a more or less comprehensive survey. Then I saw the WebService namespace and realized it contains over thirteen hundred modules. Good God. Not something I could actually survey in any meaningful way.

Clearly I needed to search CPAN in a more specifically useful manner. And just as clearly, I needed to do that locally. Which led me to CPAN::Mini. Randall Schwarz wrote this in 2002 when a colleague asked him for a CD with CPAN burned on it and he realized that the size of "the CPAN" (when did we drop the "the"? Or is it just me?) was far too large, but a "mini-CPAN" with just the latest version of each module would be 200 MB and easily fit on a CD.

As of this writing, of course, even a mini-CPAN won't fit on a CD, being 1.84 GB in over 30,000 files. But I downloaded it anyway. I have a CPAN.

What I'm going to do first is just to find all the dependencies on LWP, WWW::Curl, Net::Curl, HTTP::Client, HTTP::Client::Parallel, HTTP::Tiny, and HTTP::Lite. If I run across any other basic HTTP clients, I'll include them in the seed list as well.

No, wait, I guess what I'm going to do first is to try to come up with a more or less complete list of HTTP clients on CPAN, while whistling past the infinite-regress graveyard. (Note: this is a TODO in the article.)

Anyway, the modules we find that way will break down into three categories: (1) modules that implement an API client, (2) support modules that provide an API client framework, and (3) modules that just retrieve HTTP for other purposes, which we'll ignore. Then I'll repeat the step for the modules found in (2) to find indirect dependencies. Obviously, the tool I want is something that can take an input module name and return a list of all modules that depend on it, so I'll do that in the next section.

It might be instructive to get a list of all the URLs used in these APIs. But my ultimate goal here is to see how people are doing things, and see how many of these implementations might be useful in coming up with best Perl practices for writing a Web API client.