Perl is used in some surprising and unexpected areas. To automate the discovery of these projects, there's now a new metric in UpStats that looks for opensource projects (on major code hosting platforms) mentioned in freelance job ads.

The aim of this blogpost is to list some of those areas as well as give some examples of projects written in Perl.

Slimserver (also called logitech media server) is a project developed by Logitech. This is actually a streaming radio server written in Perl (similar to icecast). The setup here is composed of two pieces, the server and the player.

The second part is the player. You can play the music from this server on your desktop, phone etc. Logitech seems to be selling some devices called Squeezebox which you can use as players. You can make playlists, put your own music in there. It's pretty cool. And slimserver even has a bugtracker that has some old bugs reported on there. I've actually used Slimserver and liked it quite a lot.

Musicbrainz-Server the web frontend to the MusicBrainz Database.

MisterHouse (sourceforge page) and fhem are house automation frameworks. With IoT on the rise, these would surely take off. I first found out about them in a job ad on UpWork actually.

Fixmystreet is an interesting platform to help people report problems with their streets(potholes, broken street lights) to the appropriate authority.

Munin (similar to Nagios) is an opensource networked resource monitoring tool written in Perl.

RT and OTRS, two of the long-standing ticketing systems out there are written in Perl.

Traffic Control (docs) is an actual CDN implementation written in Perl.

PgBadger , Percona Toolkit , mysqltuner log analyzers, for both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

bucardo is a table replication system while pgBackRest is a backup and restore system, both for PostgreSQL, both written in Perl.

Sqitch is a database migration tool written in Perl (it supports a lot of the popular databases).

pgTAP is written in Perl and it allows you to unit-test your Postgres SQL queries. I think it's very well suited for complex queries or stored procedures or functions written in PL/pgSQL.

EPrints is a document management system aimed at Higher Educational institutions and individuals.

LedgerSMB and sql-ledger are double entry accounting/ERP systems.

Interchange An e-commerce framework written in Perl.

Perl is also big in the area of bioinformatics these days. With projects like BioPerl, GBrowse (genome browser), genome (genome analysis software), Ensembl and geneontology .

Zentyal is an Exchange mail server for Linux.

In conclusion, the main areas Perl has been used for are

Log analyzers

Natural language processing packages

ETL solutions

Monitoring solutions

Crawlers

Web applications

Document management systems

Ticketing systems

Accounting systems

It's less known that it has been used for a long time to build bioinformatics software and lately home automation software.