Erik Colson

Hi,

Next Sunday (5 february), Fosdem 2012 is hosting our Perl booth and Perl devroom. We welcome a bunch of impressive speakers. The schedule is published here.

If you are coming to Fosdem but did not select talks from the Perl devroom: read the text below and reschedule your day ;)
If you didn't plan to come to Fosdem but are or can free next Sunday, read the text below and book your day !
Best of all, Fosdem is free of charge and you don't have to register your presence.

Most talks in the Perl devroom cover specific Perl development aspects, ranging from beginner to expert stuff. If you are a Perl developer, these will certainly be most valuable to you! Check the schedule!

Beside these 'developers' talks, we wanted to show people what programmers actually achieve with Perl. Perl is widely used in a lot of interesting project and we have the pleasure to present some of them to the Fosdem public. These projects have their own community of users, they don't focus on Perl as a language but on the problem they solve with it. You don't need to be a developer to follow the talks, you might share a subject of one of them or may just want to know how Perl projects are started and evolve.
The only required skill to follow these talks is 'curiosity'.
So if I raised your interest, check the following list of talks with their description.

The LemonLDAP::NG Project
LemonLDAP::NG is a free WebSSO software written in Perl and using Apache engine. It supports CAS, OpenID and SAML 2.0 protocols.

Modern PerlCommerce
Interchange is an Open Source e-commerce software written before the advent of any modern Perl. Thus we implemented a lot of things like running a server, dispatching, parameter parsing, session handling and templating. We decided to reduce the source code drastically by using modules from CPAN like Dancer, PSGI and Template::Flute instead of our own custom code.
Interchange will become a collection of a few base modules providing an API for carts, payment, shipping and access control which can be extended easily with plugins. This provides you with a solid, fast, simple and flexible platform for your online business based on modern Perl, which is going to be demonstrated during the presentation.

The FusionInventory Project
FusionInventory is an IT asset inventory solution. The project has two components: the server, a PHP plugin for GLPI and the agent, a Perl program.
The agent is responsible for executing various tasks implemented as plugins, such as local inventory, network discovery, software execution, etc. Its design, resulting from the aggregation of multiple unrelated pieces of software, was quite... baroque. This talk will present the challenge of joining an already existing project, with a legacy code base, and turning it to modern Perl best practices.

LedgerSMB
NOTE : This is a last minute talk, so it is not listed (yet) on the Fosdem site. The talk is scheduled at 12:25 to 12:45.

LedgerSMB is a webbased ERP built with Apache, Perl and PostgreSQL, featuring general ledger accounting, receivables and payables management, budgetting, quotation and order management and more. It aims to be a platform to build businesses on: with existing installs running payment runs of 1000s of items each week it can be considered to be high performance being able to serve larger businesses. With a user community focus, the project strives to achieve easy installation and use to best serve small businesses and single person companies.
The talk touches all of these subjects as well as describing the future direction of development.