17 April 2000 :: Announcing a new public release of IBPerl,
the Perl 5 module for InterBase RDBMS

?

What is IBPerl?

• IBPerl is an object-oriented class module and extension for Perl 5. The module provides an interface to the InterBase API library, for programming dynamic SQL applications with the RDBMS server product from InterBase Software Corp.

  IBPerl is available for free, distributable under the Artistic License or the GNU General Public License.

  Note 23 June 2000 :: I've patched IBPerl 0.8 for the third time. The problems corrected in this update include:

  • IBPerl now works with ActiveState Perl on Windows
  • One can now compile IBPerl on Win32
  • The download now includes a pre-compiled binary
  • New example scripts for copying data from database to database, and performing cross-database joins
  • Scaled Numeric input parameters now interpret values correctly
  • Memory leaks when freeing IBPerl handles are fixed

  Download patched versions:
  Unix/Linux (173Kb)

  Windows Zipfile (209Kb)

• IBPerl provides a Perl-ish programming interface to InterBase. Any Perl script for which you wish you had a real OLTP database backend you can now write. CGI scripts for the Web, interactive applications, automation or systems administration tools that need database access, anything!

• It comes with reference documentation, as a "pod" file (HTML - can be viewed and saved here). The distribution also contains example scripts. See also the F.A.Q.

• Perl 5.004, and InterBase 4.0 or higher. You must have the Interbase product in order to compile and use IBPerl.

• Assuming that you have both InterBase and Perl 5.004 or greater installed and running on your system, follow these steps:

• UNIX/Linux:

  1. Unpack the IBPerl archive:
     tar xzvf IBPerl-08p3.tar.gz
     or gzip -d -c IBPerl-08p3.tar.gz | tar xvf -

  2. Change to the IBPerl directory:
     cd IBPerl-08p3

  3. On Linux, you can run the Install script:
     perl Install
     If you do this, you can skip the other steps.

  4. Configure the Makefile:
     perl Makefile.PL

     This should create an appropriate Makefile for your platform, based on the rules described in Makefile.PL

  5. Build the IBPerl extension:
     make

  6. Install the IBPerl extension:
     make install

• Windows 95/98/NT/2000:

  1. Unpack the IBPerl archive, IBPerl-08p3.zip, using Winzip or PKzip
  2. Change to the IBPerl directory:
     cd IBPerl-08p3

  3. Run the Install script:
     perl Install

  4. You can optionally follow the compiling steps as described under UNIX/Linux if you want to recompile IBPerl yourself. You'll need a C compiler.

• Any platform that has an InterBase client library can work with IBPerl. Bill Karwin develops IBPerl on Linux, and tests on Windows?2000. IBPerl is also known to run on Solaris, SCO OpenServer and HP-UX.

• IBPerl itself does not currently conform to the DBI interface. There exists another package from Edwin Pratomo that implements a DBD wrapper around IBPerl. You do need IBPerl in order to use Edwin's DBD::InterBase package.

IBPerl is a contributed freeware software package, and neither Bill Karwin, nor Inprise Corp. is responsible for damages resulting from its use or misuse. Test early, test well, test often.