Wow ... seriously?

I've just had the misfortune to read an article about how to use Java from Perl. Maybe I am missing the point here but that sounds like one of the most awful things you could possibly do. I've spent the past 5 years working in bioinformatics (an industry where Java & Perl are the major players outside of algorithm work) and not once have I ever thought "I wish I could use my Java in Perl".

It's amazing really but I've encountered this exact problem of Java to Perl communication over the past 3 weeks the final decision was to communicate using JSON & then leave Perl to work over the incoming JSON data. This works brilliantly and we have a very clear separation of concerns between Java & Perl. Java gets the data, passes it into Perl & then Perl can manipulate it to it's hearts content. It's even good for testing since we have canned JSON files with data.

Now if it was a Perl implementation in the JVM I think I'd be more interested; but for the moment I think I'll pass on these modules.

A Perl of Wisdom for Me

Every so often I find a really nice construct I didn't know existed in Perl and I can never remember it. Well I'm going to post them here and see if it kicks my memory into gear.

Copying an array

my $array = [1,2,3]; # From somewhere

my $copy = [@{$array}]; #De-reference array into an anonymous array & assign

Populating a hash from an array via a slice

my %hash;

my @keys = qw/ key key2 key3 /;

@hash{@keys} = (); #Populate hash with keys and no values

#Populate hash with keys from array and values from same position in the assigned list

@hash{@keys} = (1,2,3);

Copying one hash to another

my $input = {key => 1, key2 => 2, key3 => 3};

my %target = (key, 4);

#And now for the copy magic

@target{keys(%{$input})} = values(%{$input}); #1 deref is better than 2 but is ok for tiny calls

Anyway I hope this is of use to someone other than me. If not then it'll be of some use to me.