For the third year in a row, the Shibuya Perl Mongers brought YAPC::Asia to Tokyo, this time on campus at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which I hereby proclaim to be the best venue yet. Today's Day One was the second day actually, as there were also some additional talks yesterday (including one by co-worker-on-sabbatical Faiz), but I was tied up at work and could not go. Equally unfortunately, there is no T-shirt this year, and I could not get WiFi to work on the XO-1.

Larry Wall: A Standard That Is Meant To Be Broken.

A keynote that was a bit more on the technical side (they are usually more political or philosophical), in which $Larry talked about internals of the Perl6 parser he has been working over the last year. He stressed that there are not really any built-ins, and that the parser can be extended or otherwise modified at runtime to support all kinds of languages. And there is still a lot of dwimmery going on, such as the longest token matcher, which provides a sensible default behaviour when trying to parse a complex grammar.

Kang-min Liu: Continuous Testing.

A presentation of Test::Continuous, which polls your source directory for changed files, so that relevant tests can be run when you update them.

Lunch break

Another accidental lunch with Larry Wall (and his wife, and Faiz), at Matsuya.

Jose Castro: Perl Black Magic.

A very entertaining introduction to obfuscation and Perl Golf.

Ingy döt Net: JavaScript Love for Perl Hackers.

Ingy has ported the very popular jQuery to Perl, so that you can do web scraping with this powerful DOM query language. He also introduced his latest slideshow system Vroom, and proposed to use CPAN to distribute JavaScript libraries as well.

Leon Brocard: Working in the cloud.

Leon explained how his company is operating without any hardware himself, having outsourced everything to Amazon, Google and the like.

Jesse Vincent: Step 3 - Prophet.

In what was the most exciting talk for me, Jesse talked about Best Practical's experimental peer-to-peer replicated database. This fits in very nicely both with my recent musings about the future of databases, and my recent migration from Subversion to the distributed Mercurial source version control system, which works very similarly. The biggest challenge of these peer-to-peer systems is how to resolve conflicting updates.

Chia-liang Kao: Running A Perlish Small Business.

CL in his spare time runs AIINK, a small printing company, and explained how he quickly cobbled together the infrastructure for it with Perl.

Makoto Kuwata: The Fastest Template Engine in Perl World.

Yet another templating engine, but these things get incrementally better, and this one is pure Perl, very fast, feature-rich, and has an extremely clever (if you know Japanese) name: Tenjin - Template Engine.

Lightning Talks

More templating engines, YAPC financials, RSS readers, Perl6 signatures in sane Perl5, Japanese CPAN authors, from POE to Erlang (prologue), an OS written in Perl, web services, and crazy HTML hacks