[ILUG-Cochin.org] November 2008 Meeting Details

[events at ilug-cochin.org]

Warm Greetings To The FOSS Community,

The meeting for the month of November was conducted successfully, The
turnout was less compared to the last meeting, but again this induced
free flow of ideas among the people that came.

Some brief snapshots from the meeting.

Date: 23-11-2008
Time: 2:30pm - 5:30pm
Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor, AMI Trust Building,
       Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam
Attendance: 14

The meeting started at 2.30pm. As one of our member Shihaz has passed
away, we had a silent prayer before the meeting.

As usual the meeting started with the discussion of Free Software, GNU
project, GNU/Linux and Free Software Licenses.

Agenda Discussion

The proposed agenda for the day was "Why ILUG should be Indian Libre
User Group?". The meeting was warm because all of the attendees were
expressing their views in this regard. Libre is a Spanish word which
means "Freedom". Some of the attendees told that it would create a
confusion of the word "Libre" among new comers.

Some members agreed on the aspect that as the ILUG is aiming
is not only on Software freedom but also in non technological area the
word "Libre" will be the most apt word. Also the advantage that ILUG's
domain name change could be avoided was also pointed out.

There were suggestions to change ILUG to GNU Linux Users Group, Free
Software User Group etc. But since in the Free Software community the
group was known as ILUG Cochin,a complete name change would make
it difficult to maintain identity.

There was a small tea break after the agenda discussion.

After tea and biscuit everyone moved on to attend
the session "Learning PHP".

Technical presentation: Learning PHP

PHP is one of the most popular server side scripting language. PHP is
a recursive acronym which means "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor".The
speaker stressed the importance of learning HTML, CSS etc. before
learning PHP. It is neccessary to know how to run PHP scripts. For
that the developer should have knowledge about Web Server (eg: Apache)
and Database Server (eg: MySQL) and how to configure it for running
PHP. He started with a simple PHP script which displays "Hello world".

file.php:

<?php
          print "Hello world";
?>

He ran the script in both command line and in web server.

Command Line:
ilug at localhost:~$ php file.php

Web server:
firefox http://localhost/file.php

He explained how to use variables, arrays, conditional statements,
loops etc with examples. Then he talked about functions. Next he gave
a brief idea about Object Oriented PHP. He showed how to write a
program in object oriented method. A list of built in PHP functions
were also explained. Storing data into a MySQL database and fetching
it from database was also explained with examples. Some of the PHP
frameworks like Zend, Symphony were also explained. He gave a list of
popular applications (Mambo, Joomla, etc) developed using PHP. Finally
he gave the links of sites for PHP documentation and tutorials.

Concluding session:
The meeting concluded at 5.30. All the attendees were favoring the
move of ILUG to Indian Libre User Group.

The name change could only be brought only after a conclusion
on the mailing list , the attendees suggested a poll as an effective method
And the technical session, "Learning PHP" encouraged some of the attendees
to start learning PHP, and to clear some myths about programming/
scripting languages for many non programmers.

Attendees:

Venkat
Mahesh
Sanal Kumar
Kevin Sha
Lenin
Binny
Sreenadh
Sameer
Plato William
Prinson
Shibin
Ajith
Kurian
Alexander

Thanks to Binny for the presentation. We thank all the attendees for
coming and making the meeting a success. We hope next meeting is
bigger and better.

The meeting details and photos will be available on the website
within a few days.

Thank you