Monthly Archives: July 2009

CSS Frameworks

The other day I was trying to make sense of all my feeds, that is, keeping up with the enormous amount of unread news, and I saw an article on IBM DeveloperWorks, "Weaving a better web page".

It's really interesting and I suggest you to read it. I've certainly heard about web frameworks, and javascript frameworks are not uncommon nowadays, but it was the first time that I saw mentioned "CSS frameworks".

Turns out this is a very useful concept. Abstracting away browser differences (Internet Explorer, anyone?), layout and typography are the main areas where these kind of frameworks shine. The one mentioned in the article is Blueprint, but there's tons of others, like yaml.

When I'll have time to redesign my personal page, I'm sure I will try out one of these tools…

LWP::Simple for Perl 6

During the last Perl 6 hackaton in Oslo, I got to meet in person some very cool folks from the Perl Community, and we had a lot of brainstorming fun, as usual.

I went there with the ambitious (and out of my skills, most probably) goal of implementing a Socket interface for Perl 6. Talking to the various smart folks there, I realized that we didn't need to write that much, because Parrot, on which the current Perl 6 implementation is based on, already had sockets support.

After much nagging, I wrote a quick & dirty wrapper that mimicked the existing Perl5's IO::Socket library, that Carl and Martin improved. And on top of that, we were able to write a really tiny LWP::Simple-like class for Perl 6.

Now it's on up on github, go fetch it!, before it's too late :)