[Canberra-pm] 6th June Meeting wrap-up

Michael Potter megamic at gmail.com
Thu Jun 12 01:48:04 PDT 2008


Greetings,

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...=)

This is the Perl.net.au posting:

Brief:

   * Discussed the state of scripting languages in general, and Perl6 in
particular.
   * Talked about how and why we use Perl, and what sets it apart.
   * 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.

Outcomes:

   * Future meeting will be held monthly at most, and we will try and
organize talks or special events.
   * 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.
   * 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.

*Some further details regarding the project that would have been extraneous
on the web page:*
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.

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...
*
Final Comments:
*Paul W, if you are out there and still keen to join in, drop us an email!

Cheers everyone,
MP
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