Date: Sunday, 24 August 2008
Time: 1400 hrs to 1700 hrs
Venue: HBCSE, Mankhurd
Attendance: The meeting was attended by 22 members from the community
Talks:
* Rakesh Pai - JavaScript
Mr. Rakesh Pai started off the August GLUG meet with an introduction to JavaScript, beginning with the history of JavaScript, how the name JavaScript came about and where it is headed in the future. Then he explained the features of JavaScript, how loosely typed nature of JavaScript enhances creativity, object oriented nature of JavaScript, the available data types, math library. The topic then got more indepth with practical demonstration and discussions covering the datatypes, operators, loops, functions, keywords, deep object structures. The session ended with a small overview of Aptana IDE and Firebug for debugging.
* Mr. Sanjay B. - jQuery
After getting familiar with the basics of JavaScript, it was time to move on a little higher. Sanjay then intoduced us to a fascinating JavaScript library called jQuery. We started off with names of some popular JavaScript libraries like dojo, prototype, jquery. Then Sanjay put up a demo on jQuery to explain the concepts. Various of useful and fun stuff like getters, setters, event handlers, JSON objects with animate, handling AJAX were covered with examples. Then he covered on the overhead of using jQuery library in your page, cross browser compatibility, documentation, working with CSS. The talk ended with a small discussion on processing.js by John Resig.
* Discussion on software patents
This section got deferred due to unavailability of Dr. Nagarjuna at this point of the meet. So, Mr. Dinesh Shah took the initiative of discussing what software patents are and why should we care for them. It surely introduced some new attendees in the meet to the real side of software programming, where patents play an important role. Anurag and Vivek Iyyer joined in to explain more on the same. Some of the highlighted points were
o hardware-software patent combinations o software only patents are not allowed o effect on mobile industry and opencourseware o can similar software be written on different hardware if hardware-software combination has been patented? o question and answers covered a few years back on ILUG-D wiki on the topic o how LUG as a community can help organisations like FSF challenge the patents eg. documenting the process o publishing of patent information as image PDF's
Fixing Namazu:
After the talks were done with Anurag and Dinesh Shah started the process of fixing up namazu. Apparently generating index is a long process, so it had to be left unfinished at that point.