My article 'Data Munging with Sprog' has just been published on perl.com.

I haven't announced the project on PM before, so a little background is in order. Basically it's a tool that people from the GUI world might use for some of the same types of things you'd write scripts for. (And Sprog itself it written in Perl).

With Sprog, a user can drag and drop components, or 'gears', to assemble a 'machine':

• A data input gear can be used to read input from a file (or download a URL from the web, ...).
• One or more filter gears can transform the data (eg: grep-style filtering, find/replace, ...)
• An output gear can write the result to a file (or display it on screen, ...)

Once assembled and configured, a machine can be saved, run, reassembled, re-run etc. Just like a script.

The gears are kind of analogous to Unix command-line utilities, but they're configured via dialog boxes rather than command-line options. Each gear is implemented as a Perl class with much of the GUI side of things handled automatically.

The connections between gears are analogous to pipes, except that Sprog supports a number of different types of connectors. You can only plug two gears together if their connectors match.

The article describes a somewhat plausible scenario in which you might use Sprog. It has lots of pictures too.

If you want to take it for a spin, then head on over to the Sprog Project web site.