November 2008 meeting details
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 necessary 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@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.