The technical meeting this month was smaller than usual, but we talked about a whole bunch of stuff -- it was a lot of fun. This month, it was just Daniel, Shana, and myself. We met at my place, as our usual meeting place wasn't available. I'm not sure yet, but we may end up meeting at individual houses more often.

Daniel has been exploring some different IDE's for the Perl coding he does at work. Two of those are IBM's Eclipse and jEdit. Both are Open Source. Both are written in Java. Both support plugins. Both seems kinda neat.

They both seem to offer a lot of features to Perl developers. At a glance, it appears that the best feature that Eclipse offers to Perl users is it's ability to tell you, while you're writing code, what is wrong with the code you wrote. If you type "use LPW;" (instead of "use LWP;"), it will immediatly let you know that it couldn't find LPW in @INC. The worst feature that Eclipse offers is, also, the fact that it tells you this in real time. Not that it's not neat or useful, but that it causes the system to get laggy. In fact, Eclipse in general seems a little laggy. Okay, we can disable the syntax checking. But now, we might as well be using jEdit, as jEdit seems to offer a few extra features that makes it worthwhile. This is definitely something to explore though -- even just one plugin could completely change the outlook on the usefulness of the entire system.

Shana really took a liking to jEdit. Personally, I'm quite happy with Vim. In fact, there's very little anyone could show me that an IDE offered that Vim either can't offer, or couldn't be easily programmed to offer. Want to see the entire layout of your program in a side panel, and be able to immediatly jump to any subroutine, file, or variable? Just use the Vim Tag List Plugin. Tired of typing out words? How about tab completion? Do you want to complete variables and subroutines in the current file, or more generically complete reserved words from your favorite language? Don't see what you want? Check out the hundreds of plugins on Vim's website. Still no? Vim lets you configure it using Perl, so you have a powerful language at your fingertips which you can use to extend your editor. I'd very much like to hear what an IDE can do that Vim can't.

I also spent much of the evening trying to get Perl Panel to work. Perl Panel is kinda neat, it's like a minimal GNOME Panel, but it doesn't require any particular window manager or windowing environment, and it's written in Perl. Why did I spend all evening on it? It's not because Perl Panel is tough to install. Actually, it's quite simple. But I couldn't get it's prequisites to install properly. It wants the more recent versions of Perl-Gtk2. Which, in turn, requires Perl-Glib. And the latest version (0.24) of Perl-Glib released on Sourceforge doesn't compile on RH 9. Argh. Luckily, I ran across some newer beta releases which compile just fine. With that, Perl Panel ran like a champ. I don't know that I'm quite ready to get rid of my GNOME Panel -- but I'm willing too if the right applets come out. Namely, I'd like applets which control XMMS, GAIM, and a battery monitor. A few applets to waste CPU cycles would be nice, having a fish floating around the bottom of my screen has become oddly important to me :-) That's probably easy enough to create though.

All the above was with close inspection of all three, when we could immediatly switch back and forth between them. When they aren't all up at the same time, you really can't tell a difference. Daniel felt that it's probably not worth paying extra to get Component Video. I think that if you can get S-Video, that's probably good enough. And now we know :-)