LAMP Web development

Red Hat article promoting LAMP Web development. The "P" in the LAMP is one of either Perl, PHP, or Python. I cut my teeth on web development with Perl 5 back in 1997 and stuck with Perl for most of my consulting career after that. I tried to switch to Python but decided that I did not like Python reliance on white space. I did some small PHP projects back in 2002 but forgot about it until quite recently. I am finding more and more reasons to use and PHP has become more popular than Active Server Pages (ASP) for web development.

perltoot - Linux Command - Unix Command

- Tom's object-oriented tutorial for perl - metacpan.org by Tom Christiansen

Object-oriented programming is a big seller these days. Some managers would rather have objects than sliced bread. Why is that? What's so special about an object? Just what is an object anyway?

I think this is a better-written article than mine.

Web Proxy User Activity Reporting

I inherited a number of Perl, shell, and TCL scripts that produce reports from web proxy logs.  The web proxies are scattered around the planet.  Each day at midnight local proxy time the compressed logs are exported to a centralized repository.  A set of CRON jobs executes the main script that takes as argument the region and date of the date of the log to be processed.

Since the logs are exported as compressed file and each region has two or more proxies, the main processing script must first combined the compressed logs for each region.  Once that is done several other scripts are called in turn which produce various reports such as top domain and top user. These scripts call other scripts which call other script….You get the idea.

The scripts had no error reporting so my first task after taking over from the consultant who wrote them was to add echo statements and some simple checks for exit status.  The shell scripts all use similar information on file locations, etc.  Instead of hard coding this information into each script I created another shell script that contains all the environment information.  Making a change to one script requires making a change to several others.  Messy. And time consuming.

I have decided to rewrite the whole bloody mess to do better error reporting, to put all the processing into one location, to make use of date types that do not exits in bash, and to practice my Perl.  Of course in typical hacker fashion I have started coding even before I have an architecture worked out.  I tend to keep all this in my head.  This does not always work out well especially when the problems require thinking in depth.