YAPC::NA 2007

June 25-27, Houston, TX

Leveraging Perl for Build Reuse

Leveraging Perl for Build Reuse

By Steve Taylor
Date: Monday, June 25, 2007 03:10 PM
Duration: 50 minutes
Language:


Perl is a primary component of Openmake Meister. It is used to support the Meister community developed knowledge base allowing developers to eliminate build script redundancy. This session will review how Perl has been leveraged to create the Meister Knowledge base. Perl was the selected language to be included in Meister due to its object oriented capabilities, the ease of writing if then else statements, iteration, and variable manipulation within the build process. This session will demonstrate how the core Perl modules have been extended to support a reusable build environment. In particular, the Perl module File::Spec will be reviewed for manipulating file and directory names in conjunction with Meister's object oriented classes. The File::Spec methods are used by Meister to create reusable build scripts that are both dynamic and adaptable. Eliminating redundancy within the build process is a cornerstone in agile environments where continuous builds are performed. Real world examples of reusable build scripts written in Perl will be demonstrated. Attendees will gain an understanding of how Perl can be used to wrapper compiler calls and standardize the build process for cross platform and cross tool environments.

The talk will be given by Steve Taylor. Mr. Taylor is an experienced senior developer with 19 years of experience in both distributed and mainframe application development. Prior to founding OpenMake Software in 1995, Mr. Taylor served as a Technical Consultant assisting companies with defining a solid build and release process. In this capacity, Mr. Taylor became expert in the use of configuration management and release tools and recognized the need for a solid, unscripted repeatable build process. At this time he began developing the build procedures which have since become Openmake. Mr. Taylor received his Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science/Mathematics from the University of Illinois-CU.