Perl News

London-based DIY website company Moonfruit have been acquired by Yell for $29 million.

“What’s that doing on Perl News,” I hear you say, “surely Moonfruit is Flash-based?” Well, yes, the user-facing stuff is largely Flash (although they’ve been doing a lot of work with HTML5 recently) but behind the scenes, the sites are all driven by Perl. A lot of their newer systems are written using Dancer as described by their developer Alex Knowles last year.

It’s great to hear about a company that uses Perl doing so well. Congratulations to Wendy, Joe, Eirik and all of the team.

More details from Wired, the Independent and Moonfruit’s blog.

Following their donation of $10,000 in the summer, Booking.com have made another donation towards the future development of Perl. This time the donation is for €100,000. Perl Foundation president Karen Pauley and former Perl 5 Pumpking Jesse Vincent are travelling to Amsterdam where they will accept the donation.

More details and a press release will be available on the Perl Foundation web site later.

The Perl Foundation is aiming to participate as a mentoring organization in Google Code-in 2011! Our application must be prepared by 1st November 2011 and if we are successful this will be announced on 9th November 2011.

We would gratefully ask for your help by providing project ideas for this year’s students as soon as possible so that we can gain acceptance onto this program. Tasks can be added after the 1st November but the more tasks we have by that date the more chance we have of succeeding as a mentoring organisation.

The program ideally suits small tasks that can be achieved within a few hours to a few days of work. The students will be at high school/college and be aged between 13 – 18 years.

Please visit this page for information and learn how to submit your tasks here.