Minutes for the 22nd of April, 2004

Topics

Presentation by Lloyd on Web Services

Lloyd gave a great presentation on XML-RPC, SOAP, and a batch of other buzzwords related to server-to-server (or server-to-client) interaction over HTTP and XML. Slides are available here, though the discussion was wide-ranging.

There was a bit of debate over whether XML-RPC feels more "perl-like"; there seemed consensus between the two who had used both of these (Lloyd and Martin) that XML-RPC works well if you have control over both the client and the server; it is a much simpler protocol than SOAP. SOAP, while more sophisticated, isn't as widely adopted as Lloyd would wish.

Discussion of YAPC::NA in Buffalo

YAPC::NA doth approach (June 16-18) and there is talk of carpooling. So far we think three people are going; Daniel, Lloyd, and Shuchit. Recommendations were offered by Daniel, who has been to two prior YAPCs. It's a great opportunity to see interesting and occasionally mindbending talks, and spend time with some of the perl luminaries like Damian Conway, Brian Ingerson, Pudge Nandor, Nat Torkington, Randal Schwartz, etc. Oh yes, Larry Wall too. Other upsides: three tracks of talks; 250 attenders; inexpensive- $85 for the conference plus dorm accomodations; and this year it's close (last year was in Florida; the previous was in St. Louis, Missouri).

Topics for the next two meetings

We might have topics for the next two meetings. We decided to try holding summer meetings, as long as energy was there for them, since Arguile won't be available to give his talk in the Fall. The May meeting (Wednesday the 19th), may be on Perl and Cryptography (watch the list for an announcement soon); and Arguile volunteered the following meeting to demo his spiffy-sounding embedded linux box that has a bunch of perl at the back-end.

It has occurred to me that June's regular meeting date is during YAPC; which suggests that we either bump our meeting a week in either direction, or perhaps hold off until July. Suggestions are welcome.

Alternate location possibility

Arguile will look into our holding the next meeting in downtown Kitchener, at Theatre and Company's board room. This has going for it: 1) nice space, 2) patio, and 3) cash bar on premesis. The only forseeable downside is that Martin will need to borrow a projector since none will be provided on-site.

If this worked out, perhaps we would end up successfully going for drinks, instead of talking around the table until we realized it was nearly 10pm and too late to go for drinks. We're lame. But it was a really nice chat.

Mosix Cluster

Tomás briefly demoed the U of Waterloo's OpenMosix cluster, which has nothing explicitly to do with perl except for the stress-test script he ran to show the load-balancing and process migration among 8 different machines. Cool stuff. Tomás also empahsized that he is in fact not an expert on Mosix, even if people seem to think so. Little does he know that claiming to not be an expert is a guaranteed way for people to conclude that he is one. Too bad.