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Agenda

On 04 November, 2004, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:

Location:

Report

  1. David Baird
  2. Gabor Szabo
  3. Itzik Lerner
  4. Jason Friedman
  5. Kfir Lavi
  6. Mikhael Goikhman
  7. Oded S. Resnik
  8. Offer Kaye
  9. Ran Eilam
  10. Ronen Shemesh
  11. Shaul Karl
  12. Shlomi Fish
  13. Thomas Maier
  14. Uri Bruck
  15. Yuli Stremovsky
  16. Yuval Yaari

Welcome the the monthly Israeli Perl Mongers meeting summary. We report. You decide.

Quite a few mongers showed up.

There were some interesting interactions with our host, The Israeli Yellow Pages Company. The CEO inquired about the rowdy bunch he saw stretched out all over his company lobby sofas, and the projector was offline. Through some amazing ingenuity we got the projector online. The CEO was given our URL, to help him understand who we are.

In the burekas domain, I am sorry to say things are not improving. Two mongers, who will remain nameless, went to get us food. Unfortunately the quantities were so small, that I cannot even comment on it's quality. Perhaps someone who got to the table *before* it was emptied can.

We started off with the XUL::Node presentation which I had prepared. Actually there was nothing to prepare, as I had barely enough time to run through the demos, and examine at some demo source code. Everything went smoothly, except popups showing in the wrong monitor. Some great points were raised by the audience: Itzik asked questions concerning scalability, and was worried about supporting many concurrent users, Oded suggested an approach more in line with what people are already doing- perhaps make Glade produce XUL, and let you write event handlers in Perl.

Then David Baird talked about STAF, an IBM open-source test automation framework. It is a framework in the sense that it is a semi-complete application. All you have to fill in, are configurations, and the actual tests. Once you do that, you get monitoring, remote control, logging, and many other useful testing services for free. Sounds like David does scaffolding work in his company: configuration management, testing, and the like. So he also told us about the bigger picture- how are test labs connected to company networks (they are not), and more.

My problem was (as I said) that I did not see the simplest possible complete test cycle- from installation to viewing of results. I did hear enough to make me try STAF. Perhaps some other time David can show us a complete test.

Some extra time was available, so Gabor, who is always ready to fill any time slot, talked to us about some monger issues:

And more.

Then Yuri informed us about a security conference, and invited people interested in the field to come.

As usual, the highlight was the social event.

We went to the Arcafe place. The atmosphere was jolly yet cerebral. We were informed of Migo's birthday. Happy birthday man. Kfir told us of his YAPC ideas, and brought us to thinking: why do we even promote Perl in Israel? Migo and myself thought it was because we want a healthy community, which can support OUR Perl work, and where we can be active and helpful. Yuri and I had a testing talk. Thomas told us more about STAF, which he had used before. Shlomi helped me out with some MediaWiki questions. I expressed the need for something more interactive than just talks in the YAPC. Yuval talked about different quality levels among Tel-Aviv coffee houses, and how he thinks the idea of Heaven is all about smooth asphalt and fast roller blades. He also talked about Class-DBI. Again. And the problems of separation of responsibilities in his code.

Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg, where the iceberg is the amount of Perl and non-Perl conversations that floated around. And I can assure you it was all much more coherent than the last paragraph.

See you in the next meeting!

This meeting summary was written by Ran Eilam.