This is about programming with Perl and Objective-C on OS X, not a bizarre recipe for snacks peculiar to demented desert nomads.

If you were unfortunate enough to come here looking for an off-beat chocolate dessert, the Cocoa referred to is Apple Computer's object-oriented application programming environment for OS X.

Camel Bones is Sherm Pendley's nice, Objective-C/Perl bridge.

Sherm's framework readily permits those of us who grew up in the Perl/Unix world to offer our painstakingly crafted Perl services via the Mac's elegant, Cocoa-driven graphical user interface. Without Sherm's framework, it would have been far more difficult to give recent OS X versions of Southern Sites their distinctive Cocoa flavor.

This week, I completed a network-aware user-preferences plug-in for Southern Connections' still heavily Perl-dependent Southern Sites Web services automation package.

Supported by Apple's user/application-preferences plug-in architecture and variously inspired by Growl, Dave Batton's well-animated user-preferences library, Matt Gemmel's SS_PrefsController and others, the result gives enterprise-wide control to system administrators and provides secure, over-the-internet updates to our clients.

Our client package for OS X relies upon Apple's core data (the Perl is on the server).

We did look at but have thus far chosen not to use Base Ten for client access to the underlying PostgreSQL database server.That decision was driven by the move to Java. In the next version, Perl will give way to Java throughout. After some prototyping, we have decided to season our Cocoa/Objective-C with Cayenne.