Greetings,<br><br>The last Canberra.PM meetup was held on 6th. Attendees were Michael, Guy and David. What we lacked in numbers we made up for in enthusiasm...=)<br><br>This is the <a href="http://Perl.net.au" target="_blank">Perl.net.au</a> posting:<br>
<br>Brief:<br><br> * Discussed the state of scripting languages in general, and Perl6 in particular.<br> * Talked about how and why we use Perl, and what sets it apart.<br> * Discussed the idea of a group Project. David brought along a great idea, which is to take an existing project he has been working on (a hospital rostering system), and convert it from Access/VBA to a database driven web-based system using Perl,AJAX and even Prolog for the decision engine. <br>
<br>Outcomes:<br><br> * Future meeting will be held monthly at most, and we will try and organize talks or special events.<br> * The project group can continue on an independent path, so as not to exclude people from the meet-ups who aren't part of the project.<br>
* Michael and David seem keen to participate in the project. Guy has less time on his hands, but may be able to use his experience to offer guidance and support. <br><br><i>Some further details regarding the project that would have been extraneous on the web page:</i><br>
All three of us agreed that the project proposal from David was a very good start. As Guy said, it covered all bases: utilizing a database back-end that will be interfaced with DBI; a solid middle layer containing some real decision making logic, possibly incorporating a Logic processing language (eg Prolog) to encode the logic rules and whatnot; and a dynamic, web-based front-end that utilizes some techniques Michael is very fond of...particularly using AJAJ (the last J stands for JSON ;) to enable complex data structures to be easily sent from Perl to JavaScript. We are now awaiting some samples of the existing application from David in order to begin designing and prototyping. <br>
<br>Another point Michael was very keen to get across is that the project should be learning focused rather than outcome focused (or should I just say the outcome should be learning =/). That is to say, we shouldn't be overly concerned if we actually produce a complete, finished product or not, but rather what we learn along the way. Particular, some aspects of programming in general that are often overlooked: testing and test-driven development; benchmarking and optimization; quality POD based documentation; proper version control using SVN (Guy offered to help us on this one!); inside-out OO programming using Class::Std; generally try to adhere to as many points from Perl Best Practices as we can (or agree with); build Modules to CPAN standard using h2xs; etcetera etcetera...<br>
<i><br>Final Comments:<br></i>Paul W, if you are out there and still keen to join in, drop us an email!<br><br>Cheers everyone,<br>MP<br><br><br>