Re: Perl and Pipes. Share your story.

[mattr]

I don't know if the Gimp's perl-fu server counts as a pipe or not. But a few years ago I had a job dropped in my lap, to make a thousand page website with some thousands of photos in it. The website would show photo galleries online of interiors for the various hotels of a hotel group, but they only had two weeks to do it, and it had to be a static site - no databases. And they would have last minute changes.

I took a week or so to figure out perl-fu and crunch some page templates, making a perl program that would pull photos off a CD, do lots of photo processing in the Gimp, and add code into templates for things like mouseover highlighting of thumbnails etc. The processing was tested using the a perl shell utility and copying the work, like for adding a frame with alpha channel masking, into the program. Also I decided to make the thumbnails rotate in a circular fashion as you surfed through the site, that wasn't too hard either. The entire thing culminated into a run of 5 minutes for photo processing and a few more minutes to write out a thousand static web pages.

The interesting part was watching the run. The Gimp would open photos in windows, resize them and close them with blinding speed as if a phantom graphic designer was sitting at the keyboard. I picked my jaw off the floor and called the system Magic Hands. Haven't had much use for it since then (though proposed it to someone recently), but it proved to be very useful at the time when as I had predicted last minute changes came in that would have been impossible otherwise. Another 5 minute run and those changes were rolled into the site easily. Call it self fulfilling but it proved to me again that Perl was not just glue but also an enabling tool. When I bet on Perl it seldom lets me down.