From: JB To: 'cone-cal@blu.org' Subject: *CAL* neSOFTdev Special Meeting Date: Tuesday, July 06, 1999 3:49 PM Hope you can make it. Event: neSOFTdev Special July Meeting When: July 13, 5:30 p.m. & 7:00 p.m. Where: Cafeteria at Prospect Place * Ground Floor * 9 Hillside Ave., Waltham, MA, 128/90, Exit 27a Contact: JohnBarrie@compuserve.com, www.BTDnet.com/neSOFTdev Corporate Supporters: www.mindq.com, www.oi.com, www.technet.oracle.com, www.awl.com/cseng/, www.oreilly.com 1. New Volunteer - Thanks Chris 2. Special Dinner Meeting: 5:30-6:45 p.m. (Let me know how you like this please.) 3. Special Meeting: 7:00 p.m. 4. A Challenge 1. We have a new volunteer with tons of Industry experience to do an "ASP and the Internet" session at our meetings. Come and introduce yourself to Chris and wish him the best for his September neSOFTdev start. 2. We are taking the July speaker out to dinner before the special meeting (Bertucci's across the highway from the meeting at 5:30-6:45 p.m.). I will start the networking session off with a theme. I will do an outlandish, but true blackboard state of the Industry talk to start the conversations rolling. This is your chance to network on a personal level. 3. Perl Inside by Brian Jepson Perl is an interpreted scripting language that has been described as the duct tape of the Internet. Part of the reason it has achieved this status is that Perl is optimized for text processing and has built-in capabilities for TCP/IP network communications. Perl is also very popular because Perl Programmers have a rich tradition of sharing code: not only is Perl itself freely redistributable, but hundreds of well-organized, well-documented extensions and modules are available on CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. As an example, the libwww-perl module builds on Perl's powerful network capabilities to offer a high-level object-oriented interface to HTTP and FTP servers. Perl's text processing capabilities include a rich regular expression sub-language, which can be used to parse, file, sort, index, brief, debrief, or number any sort of textual data. Rich regular expressions can be written to extract any sort of data from large text files: phone numbers, URLs, email addresses, and more. If you have formatted or unformatted data that needs to be parsed, Perl can help you out. How does this help users of other development tools? Many such tools offer rich semantics that are geared toward desktop development, but they often lack the sort of high-level TCP/IP network connectivity and text processing features that Perl has. In this talk, Brian Jepson shows how you can use ActivePerl (ActiveState's distribution of Perl for Win32) and Microsoft's ActiveX technology to embed Perl in host languages such as Java, Visual FoxPro, and Visual Basic. You'll learn how to: * embed Perl using either PerlScript with the Microsoft Script Control (both are free) or PerlCtrl, a tool included with O'Reilly's Perl Resource Kit and ActiveState's Perl Developmen Kit for building ActiveX components * fetch remote WWW documents with only a few lines of Perl and host language code * extract various types of data from textual data * perform transformations on textual data * make TCP/IP network connections using Perl and the host language * find Perl extensions and modules to do your bidding Brian Jepson is the author of a fistful of books which include: WWW Database Programming for Windows NT and the Perl Resource Kit Utilities Guide. He is also the author and maintainer of tinySQL, a free lightweight SQL engine written in Java. As the non-leader of SMT (a loose-knit technical strike force in Providence, RI), he participates in the care and feeding of AS220's public access computing initiatives. 4. OK, lets see how good you are. I know we are supposed to be off for the summer and the weather of late has dampened the spirits. But, Brian is a tremendous resource. I also know of no other place where you can get this kind of presentation. So, cancel your beach evening, come to Bertuccis and/or the meeting, and show your appreciation for the Open Source movement and Brians personal contributions toward a better world for us all. Here is the challenge -- talk Brian into coming back and giving us an internals code review on tinySQL. Here is a secret to help you - Brian likes to have fun! Are you up for it? --------------------- Earlier announcement: --------------------- Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 07:57:02 -0400 From: JB Subject: neSOFTdev extra event An extra event! Event: neSOFTdev July Meeting When: July 13, 7:00 p.m. Where: Cafeteria at Prospect Place * Ground Floor * 9 Hillside Ave. Waltham, MA, 128/90, Exit 27a Contact: JohnBarrie@compuserve.com, www.BTDnet.com/neSOFTdev Corporate Supporters: www.mindq.com, www.oi.com, www.technet.oracle.com, www.awl.com/cseng/, www.oreilly.com 1. Special Meeting 2. OTN 1. I came across an opportunity that I have been trying to piece together for some time. And, July is the time to do it. So, what am I up to? How about finding some one who can discuss the top two tools for Internet development, someone who can evaluate both tools equally, someone who doesn't come to us with Vendor baggage, and someone that is fun all rolled into one person! Brian Jepson is speaking at the OReilly Open Source Software Convention http://conferences.oreilly.com and I found out he lives in Providence. And, even though his schedule is full, when I asked if he would help us out he jumped at the opportunity to meet with you all. He will also customize the evening for those of us that are Perl and/or Java challenged. So please save July 13 and support neSOFTdev. He will present a tutorial on Java and Perl integration/development. (more on this later) 2. The Oracle OTN conference http://technet.oracle.com/events is next week. I hope to see you there.