Naveen’s Journal

Finally, the day arrived this Saturday, October the 13th, when the first Web & Open Source Technology Conference took place in Kolkata. It was a great initiative to bring like-minded people on the same platform and share our views on all things Web, OSS and Technology. Since the venue host was WBUT , a large percentage of the audience were IT and Comp. Sci. students of the university who were eager to get a peek into the REAL things, and learn the tricks of the trade from the people in the Industry.

The auditorium was good enough with a capacity of around 150, well-airconditioned and the stage space more than enough. The LCD projector could have been more to the center of the stage, rather than just behind the dais, with speaker coming right in between the screen and audience. The only and a very big disappointment from the arrangements point of view was the absence of microphone!! Huh! A seminar without a microphone! Well, the equipments were there but the keys to them were with a gentleman who preferred skipping the college that day and was untraceable!

So after lot of failed efforts by the volunteers to get the microphone working - they even brought another one, but it didn’t work - the event got underway at 11:30 AM, 1 hour behind schedule. Hussain was the first one to start off on RIA - Rich Internet Applications. It was a great insight on the Web 2.0 client side technologies which are riding most of the snazzy websites today and threw light on AJAX, Flex, Flash , OpenLaszlo among others. His thoughts were well received by the audience with quite a few questions popping up on the subjects.

Next came Pradeep with a talk on what is AJAX and how to implement it in Web Apps. He showed some nifty piece of code on how to create xmlHTTPRequest and fetch data from the server in asynchronous mode. Also included were examples on how to use JSON instead of xmlHTTPRequest to implement AJAX. The content of his presentation is available at http://www.go4expert.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6829&referrerid=146 and can be downloaded from http://www.slideshare.net/s_pradeep/building-applications-using-ajax

Shabbir bhai resumed the proceedings after a well deserved lunch break with his expertise on optimising web pages, and gave a lengthy (detailed) talk on Speeding up your Web Pages. He covered topics such as Database Design, Query Optimization, Web Server & Programming tips and tweaks among others.Although his soft voice was finding it hard to make up for the lack of mic, he too put up a great show.

I was next on the block. With fears of rushing too fast and getting over with my stuff in 10-15 minutes, I started off on Web Development in Perl. Since most of the audience were students with little or no previous exposure to Web Development, Programming and Perl, added to the fact that previous sessions were a bit too technical for most of them, I had to make it as simplistic as possible. So I stressed most on the introduction part which dealt with explaining the Web Development cycle, internet in general and programming. Yet, technicalities about Perl needed to be covered as they were a part of my presentation and most importantly, were the focal point of the show! After around 30 minutes Hussu started prompting me that we were running out of time and I needed to pack up fast! So I hurried with the last part of the presentation by going through the points of difference between Perl and PHP.

The presentation can be downloaded from http://www.slideshare.net/naveeng/web-development-in-perl/