Data::Section, in simple terms, turns your __DATA__ section into a hash-table of strings keyed by indexes you choose. It gives you a clean, programmatic way of having multiple “mini-data” sections within the main one, in a fashion similar to Inline::Files (but without the niggling caveat that it could overwrite your source files). The author notes that it was originally envisioned as a way for modules to store their own (multiple) templates, which is a task I’ve had to deal with before. But it would be useful anywhere you want to store large chunks of text data, without resorting to here-documents. It also allows for inheritance of data from a module’s super-classes that also use Data::Section, allowing a class to re-use existing data and only “declare” the extra sections it needs, or those sections that need to be different. You can learn more at the advent entry for this module.

I already have a small CGI app that will be getting the Data::Section treatment, and I hope it can be useful to you as well.

I first learned about Linux::Inotify2 from a posting on acme’s blog. It’s a neat interface to the Linux Inotify system, which itself is basically a way of being informed whenever things happen in the file-system.

I was able to make use of this almost immediately– I took the sample script from acme’s post and made a few adjustments, then used it to look at the libraries that Image::Size loads during start-up. Turns out that there were a couple of them that didn’t need to be loaded until/unless needed, and once I saw this I was able to move them around and speed up the compile-time phase of the module.

This module has some great potential for monitoring, measuring, etc. I’m toying with a graphical version of acme’s script that I can have running during test suite runs, to get a better idea of other places I can improve things.

Check out the module, and check out acme’s original post on the subject, too!

Say hello to File::Tail. A simple concept, but a very, very useful one.  Ever run the *NIX “tail -f <file>” command? Yeah, it’s pretty much just like that. Only in Perl, so it’s actually more flexible. Much more.

You can use it in a very simple manner, to read from files that are continuously updating. You can control how often and to what degree it adjusts the wait-interval it uses when polling the underlying file to check for changes. You can also tie a file-handle to it. You can do things like select-polling across several such handles or objects, to read in a non-blocking way from multiple tail’d files at once. It even comes bundled with two sample scripts showing it in action.

Check it out!