PlPerlNG - first alpha code

Fellow Perlers and other interested parties,

This is an invitation to participate in the plperlNG project,
pgFoundry's first registered project. As you may know, plperl for
PostgreSQL currently has severely limited capabilities. PLperlNG is a
project designed to pull together two efforts at removing most of these
limitations: one by Andrew Dunstan was intended to be a community-based
effort, probably taking many months of work, and the other an effort
undertaken by CommandPrompt, led by Joshua Drake, was intended to follow
a much faster timeline, and has already begun.

After some discussion we decided to try to combine these efforts and try
to get something of high quality to contribute to the forthcoming
release of PostreSQL. There is now an alpha release of code from
CommandPrompt available on the project's web site. The community now
needs to become involved in code review, testing, and documentation, as
well as contributing to the coding effort. This means we will have to
move *extremely* fast.

The code will, of course, be released under standard PostgreSQL
licensing terms.

The alpha code has support for the following currently missing features:

. triggers
. returning (and passsing?) composite types
. set-returning functions
. internal access to SPI_exec _query
. provision for sharing data between plperl functions

The project's main page can be viewed at
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/plperlng

There is a developers mailing list which will soon (i.e. about 20
minutes after this mail is sent) be available at
http://lists.pgfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/plperlng-devel

There are several job openings on the site, in particular for developer,
tester, and doc writer. Please sign up for one or more of these if you
are interested.

We see this as an opportunity not only to provide great enhancements to
the server side programming language many of us would love to use if we
could, but also as a great way to show how the general PostgreSQL
community and a commercial organization can cooperate to make such an
outcome happen.

Please join us!

Sincerely,

Josha Drake
Andrew Dunstan