About me
- Developer / QA Specialist / Manager
- In Switzerland for the last eight years
- Currently working at UBS
Support
- I support Manchester United
Support
- And Southampton
Glue
- Perl is often known as a glue langauge
- Joins other components together
UBS
- "world-leading wealth management company that sits down with you to understand your needs and goals"
- www.ubs.com
- Marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
UBS
- Banks use lots of technologies
- They need to be joined together
- Perl is good at joining things together
- 3461 million Euros profit in the second quarter of 2007
- Primarily thanks to Perl
- (I made that last bit up)
Here comes the science bit!
- Banks move lots of money around
- By moving money to the right places, banks can earn or avoid paying interest
- This makes bankers happy
Go, Johnny, Go!
- This process is called:
- Cash Management
- Perl has helped UBS implement its Cash Management solution
- Together with a copious dollop of CPAN
Outsourcing
- Primary development is outsourced
- Customised product
- Needs to be integrated
Systems
- databases
- webservers
- communications
- high availability
- monitoring
- logging
- archiving
- deployment
Databases
- Oracle
- create
- manage
- manipulate
- monitor
- ad hoc queries
- import/export
- use DBI;
Webservers
- IHS - IBM's rebranding of apache
- Websphere
- configure
- start and stop
- monitor
- No special modules
Communications
- message transfer
- SMS
- error reporting
- IRC
- file transfer
Data Munging
- Files come in in all sorts of formats
- They need to be standardised
- pack and upack
- use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
MQSeries
- message transport
- configure
- start and stop
- read and extract messages
- add messages
- monitor
- use MQSeries;
- Kindly written and maintained by our friends at Morgan Stanley
High availability
- System handles many millions of [IYFC] per day
- Insert Your Favourite Currency
- If it breaks, the bank loses many thousands of [IYFC] per not-very-long
- system needs to stay up
- backup server just waiting to spring into action
- mount the disks and start it up
Monitoring
- How do we know when something goes wrong?
- When should we failover?
- Monitor!
- Based on Nagios
- Plugin infrastructure and plugins themselves written in Perl
- Monitor system
- application
- even business logic
Logging
- Logs are important to find out what went wrong
- Core application produces many Gb of logs per day
- Far to large to be useful
- Required restart of aplication every night to rotate logs
- Restarting often caused problems in the middle of the night
- Made the sysadmins grumpy
Logging
- I wrote a wrapper around the logging system
- Made the core application write to named pipes
- Read the pipes and write to proper log files
- Filter the logs
- Add timestamps
- Add logging levels
- Automatic rotation
Logging
- use Log4Perl;
- Based on select
- Multiple processes
- Made the application much more robust
- Made the business folk happy
- and the sysadmins
- Made the logs useful
Archiving
- The logs are still enormous
- So they need to be archived
- Zipped up and stored until they are old enough to be thrown away
Deployment
- Sun packages
- Package creation
- Automated deployment on test machines
- Version control with SVK
Extra development
- Database Investigation
- Management Information System
- Legal Archiving
- Automated Testing
Database Investigation
- Second system
- Half external
- Internal part based on Catalyst
- DBIx:Class, TT, JSON
Management Information System
- Daily data copied from DB and sent via file transfer
- SQL took 40 hours per day
- Rewritten in perl and takes 2 hours
- Next version (with DB schema changes) will take 15 minutes
Legal Archiving
- Send data to a UBS system
- C or Java interfaces
- XS
Automated Testing
- All the Test::* modules
- Devel::Cover
- WWW::Mechanize
- Test::WWW::Selenium
- Reading and writing from all interfaces
More Communications
- Based on Tibco EMS
- C++ and Java interfaces
- ... but in practice only Java
- Groovy!
CPAN
Alien::SeleniumRC
Apache::Compress
Apache::Filter
Apache::Session
Apache::Test
Archive::Tar
Bundle::CPAN
Bundle::LWP
B::Utils
Catalyst
Catalyst::Engine::Apache
Catalyst::Model::DBIC::Schema
Catalyst::Plugin::ConfigLoader
Catalyst::Plugin::JSONRPC
Catalyst::Plugin::Server::XMLRPC
Catalyst::Plugin::Session::State::Cookie
Catalyst::Plugin::Session::Store::FastMmap
Catalyst::Plugin::Static::Simple
Catalyst::Plugin::XMLRPC
Catalyst::View::JSON
Catalyst::View::TT
CGI::Simple::Cookie
Class::Trigger
CPAN::Mini
Crypt::SSLeay
Data::Dump
Data::Dump::Streamer
Data::Page
Data::UUID
Date::Calc
DateTime
DBD::Oracle
DBIx::Class
DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader::DBI::Oracle
DBIx::ContextualFetch
DBIx::Log4perl
DBIx::ProcedureCall
Devel::Cover
Email::Send
Exception::Class
ExtUtils::ParseXS
File::Find::Rule
FreezeThaw
HTML::Lint
Image::Size
JSON
Log::Log4perl
LWP
Module::Build
Module::Pluggable
MQSeries
Net::IRC
Net::Server
Number::Format
Perl::Tidy
PPI::HTML
Proc::ProcessTable
Shell::Source
SOAP::Lite
Sort::Versions
Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
SVK
SVN::Mirror
SVN::Simple::Edit
SVN::Web
Template
Template::Plugin::Number::Format
Test::JSON
Test::Pod
Test::Pod::Coverage
Test::WWW::Mechanize
Test::WWW::Selenium
Text::Table
Text::TabularDisplay
Text::Template