Google’s release of a code repository for open source projects has a number of languages represented, including Perl.
Perl — It’s like Java, only it lets you deliver on time and under budget.
— quote seen on Perl.org
Ever since Google opened up its Project Hosting site, it has been compared to existing hosting sites like SourceForge, only minus some of the extraneous features a project may not need.
Perl has found its way into Google’s newest contribution to the open source community already. As one might expect given Perl’s ability to chomp its way through massive amounts of text data, one of the projects we found builds on that utility.
That project would be Ack, a utility that works like grep across large coded bases. The text finder can crawl across large trees of text, but it has been optimized to work through vast amounts of source code.
Those who do bioinformatics with Perl may have an interest in Ortholytics. The project depends on Bioperl and “provides the basic pipelining and analysis tools to compare orthology at the interspecific and genome-wide level.”
Some projects have set up shop on Google Project Hosting, but serve only to redirect visitors to the projects home at a different location. The page for cometd, for example, sends people to its homepage, while the repository is hosted elsewhere instead of in Google’s Subversion implementation.
On the security side, a simple Perl project called Hackstop provides a simple monitoring system to detect and report attempts to break in to a server. The project delivers updates to a set email address, and updates /etc/hosts.deny when attacks exceed a certain threshold to ban that site from continuing to probed a system.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
