SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, represents the backbone of a new generation of Web applications known as Web Services. Check out how easy it is to build SOAP applications in Perl.

Tired of serving up static Web pages with plain old vanilla Apache? Try adding a dynamic spike of Java to the mix with Tomcat.

What began with coffee mugs being hurled across a hotel meeting room has resulted in a complete redesign of the Perl programming language. Larry Wall shares his thoughts on the future of Perl.

Using XML in your applications is just a matter of using the right API. Norm shows us how to get started.

This month's column continues our exploration of the bash shell's scripting facilities by investigating the case statement. The case statement is particularly useful for handling the arguments of a script. It is both powerful and sophisticated, making it easy to express complex conditions that would tax your patience if you coded them using an if statement.

At a summit of open source leaders convened at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July, I asked everyone what they thought was the most significant work of open source development in the past year. None of them came up with the answer I was looking for, yet all of them agreed once I proposed it: The work of James Kent, who wrote the gene assembler that allowed the Human Genome Project to finish its work three days before the private effort by Celera Genomics -- thus ensuring the gene sequence remains in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000 line program in a month, "because of his concern that the genome would be locked up by commercial patents if an assembled sequence was not made publicly available for all scientists to work on." (The New York Times, February 13, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/13/health/13HERO.html).

I have always had reservations about graphical tools for system administration. While such tools can be very convenient for experienced administrators, they offer some pitfalls to less seasoned ones. One of the prime advantages cited for these packages is that they allow people to begin performing basic administrative tasks quickly and with a minimum of training; this claim is certainly justified in many cases. However, lurking on the other side of the coin is the possibility that such tools will actually keep new administrators from learning some of the subtleties of the job because the tools hide their existence. In an effort to keep novices from getting in over their heads and causing damage, some of these tools tend to present a rather limited view of what is and isn't possible on the system.

This month, we are starting a series on network programming. This area of programming is enormous, not only because of the sheer amount of information that is needed to successfully develop network applications, but also because of the number of applications currently being developed with networking in mind. With network speeds increasing, more and more applications have a "network" version of some sort. For example, Quicken can automatically update your account information from some banks, computer games can be played with other people on the Internet, and so on.

Recently on the Perl Monastery (http://www.perlmonks.org), the user known as ton asked about parsing a Perl-style double-quoted string, as part of a project to construct a safe Data::Dumper parser that would take output and interpret it rather than handing the result directly to eval. The work in progress for their Undumper was posted, and I commented that there was probably a simpler way to do some of the things and noted that it didn't handle blessed references.

Network File System (NFS) is a file-sharing mechanism that allows for the relatively seamless sharing of files across multiple networked machines. It works by allowing client systems to mount an NFS "share" (as in "shared disk") from an NFS server as though it were a local disk.

IBM's ThinkPad is Fast, Pricey

When you picked up this month's copy of Linux Magazine, you probably noticed the cool tomcat staring at you on the cover. For those of you who are not already aware of this, Tomcat is the name of the Java servlet and Java server page technology that Sun Microsystems donated to the Apache project. (For more on Tomcat, see our feature story, pg. 28.)

Once upon a time, there was a community bound together by the dream of free software and building a real Unix-style operating system. But, despite the best efforts of Richard Stallman and others, that's all it was -- a dream -- with only a few bits and pieces (the GNU programs) in place.