Recently in Perl Category

In my day job, I developed a module which makes access to complex Perl data structures easier. I couldn't find any modules on CPAN that did exactly what I wanted to do. I needed to expose relatively complex networks of Perl references to non-technical end users, and make it easy for them to understand the structure, and search within it. The consumer modules expose Solaris 10 fmd event telemetry information to Perl programs. After writing modules to gather information from the telemetry logs, I planned to provide filtering abilities, which boils down to searching for particular structure 'fingerprints' within the telemetry, based on paths through the Perl data structure. Rather than make users write (and comprehend) unwieldly paths like '$top->{key}[0]{key}{key}[0]', which have far too much punctuation for people that aren't used to programming, I wanted to have them write paths like 'key[0].key.key[0]'. This seemed to be much cleaner visually, and therefore easier to understand.