OPEN FUSION

I started using perl back in 1996, around version 5.003, while working at UBC in Vancover. We were working on a student management system at the time, written in C, interfacing to an Oracle database. We started experimenting with this Common Gateway Interface thing (CGI) that had recently appeared, and let you write interactive applications on the web (!). perl was the tool of choice for CGI, and we were able to talk to Oracle using a perl module that spoke Oracle Call Interface (OCI)... We have an internal nginx webserver for distributing datasets with dated filenames, like . We also create a symlink called , that is updated to point to the latest dataset each time a new version is released. This allows users to just use a fixed url to grab the latest release, rather than having to scrape the page to figure out which version is the latest.