Israel.pm - The Israeli Perl Mongers

Agenda

On 09 September, 2004, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:

• 18:00-19:00 -- Assembly and light refreshments
• 19:00-20:00 -- Uri Bruck will lecture about A Simple Method to Maniplute Open Office forms with Perl.
• 20:00-20:20 -- Break and refreshments
• 20:20-21:00 -- Gabor Szabo will lecture about "Perl in Hungary - So how was the Hungarian Perl MicroWorkshop?"
• 21:00-21:45 -- Gabor Szabo will lecture about "The Quality of CPAN Modules - CPAN Testers, RT, CPANTS, CPANPLUS, CPANRATINGS, QA-Perl".
• As usual after the meeting we will go out to a nearby pub/coffee-shop/etc. for a post-meeting social gathering.

Location:

Report

1. Amit Sides
2. Gabor Szabo
3. Kfir Lavi
4. Meron Cohen
5. Mikhael Goikhman
6. Oded S. Resnik
7. Offer Kaye
8. Ran Eilam
9. Roman Parparov
10. Sagiv Barhoom
11. Shaul Karl
12. Shlomi Fish
13. Thomas Maier
14. Tomer Resnik
15. Uri Bruck
16. Yuval Yaari

September's meeting started as people started arriving around 18:00, and until 19:00 we stood (or sat) around, talking and eating bourekas.
The first lecture started at 19:00 and was given by Uri, its subject was " A Simple Method to Maniplute Open Office forms with Perl". Uri first showed us a form with text fields, then layed out the problem- directly filling the fields with data.
Because an Open Office document is simply a group of zipped XML documents, Uri's solution used Zip::Archiev and XML::Simple. There are of course modules that were build specially to handle Open Office documents, but Uri wanted his solution to be simple and with a small learning curve, so he chose to the XML::Simple module.
After some explanations about what is XML (there were a few people who didn't know what XML is), Uri got to the good stuff and showed us the code - which turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought it would be.. :-)
After he finished showing us how to manipulate the Writer file, Uri got to the second part of his lecture, where he showed us how to manipulate spreadsheet data, e.g. turn the spreadsheet into an HTML table. Neat :-)

We stopped for a short break, and then Gabor's turn was up, to talk about "Perl in Hungary - So how was the Hungarian Perl MicroWorkshop ?"
Well, for one thing we learned that Hungarian Perl Mongers also like beer :-)
Gabor gave a free-flow talk (sorry- no slides) about the MicroWorkshop, the people and the talks that were there. The discussion that followed centered around a comparison of PHP vs. Perl, and also an explanation of Parrot that Gabor gave.

Last but not least, Gabor gave a lecture titled, "The Quality of CPAN Modules", for which you can find the slides online.

After the technical meeting wrapped up most of us continued the evening in a local pub together, where we had a lot of fun and talked a lot more about Perl, the Universe and Everything :-)

This meeting summary was written by your ever cheerful Israel.pm PR person - Offer Kaye.