Yes, Perl Web Server is PSGI/Plack. That's it.

The Cherokee web server project is hosting the Cherokee Summit 2010 in Madrid, Spain on May 7th and 8th. The summit will be focused on high-performance and scalable Web technologies. I truly believe this is a major opportunity for hackers, developers and administrators looking for the new alternatives on the Web to bond and share experiences to benefit each other's projects and enterprises, and keep up to date on this field.

If you are interested on attending, proceed to the registration site (it's free of charge but seat-limited) and see you there in May!

During last weekend's WordCamp, Jeremy Clarke gave a bunch of tips for websites server optimizations (I'll summarize my views on his talk later on a separate post) and he showcased a plugin for Firebug that I didn't know about and caught my attention: Yahoo! YSlow. It is a really nice piece of software, it adds a tab on your Firebug window and will grade the performance of the web page you are browsing with a set of tips on how to make it faster, ranging from images, CSS, JavaScript, headers, etc:

I find this to not be the ultimate solution to fix your websites' loading speed of course, but something advisable to use and try to comply against.

I believe it's time for me to get my blog from D to A

Our tenth season continues next Tuesday night:

Perl Seminar New York
Tuesday Nov 17 2009
6:15 – 8:15 pm
NYPC User Group
481 8th Ave (Ramada New Yorker Hotel, West 34 St)
Suite 550

Main Topic: Perrin Harkins: "Choosing a Web Architecture for Perl"

Perl Seminar NY is once again pleased to welcome Apache expert and veteran Open Source contributor Perrin Harkins to speak at our meeting.

In the past few years, many new web proxy servers have come onto the scene with new performance promises and features. Servers based on non-blocking I/O bring claims of greatly improved performance. At the same time, FastCGI has become more widely used, giving people a possible alternative to mod_perl. Perrin's talk will help you choose the right architecture for your project by presenting a useful set of benchmarks and a comparison of strong points and key features.

Hope to see you on Tuesday November 17.

Jim Keenan
Moderator

Last week, I spent some time building a good (that I liked) feed auto-discovery tool to use in Ruby for other project I'm building, rFeed. I liked CPAN's Feed::Find, and at some point I made a wrapper class to run a Perl script using such module, however, I wasn't happy by mixing it all. So, Feedbag was born:

>> require "rubygems"
=> true
>> require "feedbag"
=> true
>> Feedbag.find "log.damog.net"
=> ["http://feeds.feedburner.com/TeoremaDelCerdoInfinito",
 "http://log.damog.net/comments/feed/"]
>> planet_feeds = Feedbag.find("planet.debian.org")
[ ... ]
>> planet_feeds.first(3)
=> ["http://planet.debian.org/rss10.xml",
 "http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml",
 "http://planet.debian.org/atom.xml"]
>> planet_feeds.size
=> 104
>>

It makes smart use of relative and absolute bases, hrefs, links, content types, etc. It is also a single Ruby file, so you can grab it and use it on your application. Plus, it only requires Hpricot as dependency. It can find all feeds linked on a web page, but it will return the most important at the beginning of the resulting array, so you will have the important one on the first results (see example above with Planet Debian).

Synopsis, README and a brief tutorial have been placed at axiombox.com/feedbag. You can also take a look at the git repo, hosted in GitHub.