twincling conducts Linux seminar at BRECW

The twincling team conducted Linux seminar at BRECW.

Bhoj Reddy Engineering College for Women is a reputed college offering courses courses in various streams of engineering and IT. The college has about 2000 students on its rolls and provides good lab facilities.

The entire twincling team was received by the Head of Dept, CSE and introduced to Prof. S. R. Ramaswamy, principal of the college. Prof. Ramaswamy talked about his vision for the college, industry focussed course content and soft skills.

The seminar was held in the main Seminar Room and was attended by about 140 students.

The keynote talk titled 'The Art of the OpenSource' was delivered by Ms. Namita Iyer. She introduced the concept of opensource software and highlighted the evolution and contribution of leaders like Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Brian Behlendorf among others.

She talked about the 'Bazaar model' of development for Linux kernel. He highlighted the "category killer" products like Linux kernel, MySQL database, Apache httpd and BIND.

She mentioned some of the reasons for the success of opensource software:
. availability
. timescale
. product features
. talented software developers
. peer review
. adoption by researchers in diverse fields

She also brought to notice, the factors that can cause the failure of projects:
. technical (lack of code modularity, portability)
. management (lack of standards, no risk assessment, no measurable goals, bad coordination)
. resource availability (nobody to do mundane tasks like doc, testing, field support, i18n, l10n)
. too many demands and too few developers
. discontinuation of the project

Some of the above mentioned points presented a balance view of the situation at hand.

There was visible interest among the students and they raised interesting queries about opensource software security, development and vulnerability fixes. This was a very pleasing discussion since the students are aware of some of the core issues.

Sasidhar Kalagara delivered a talk on 'LAMP platform' and 'PHP5'. He highlighted the importance of service oriented architectures for todays marketplace. The key components of the L:Linux A:pache M:ySQL P:HP platform were highlighted and technical details were provided.

Sasi, involved the audience by pointing out feature comparisons between ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and LAMP/PHP technologies. He discussed PHP arrays construct in detail. He built up the interest of the audience to introduce them to PHP5 which has the following interesting features:
. excellent support for OOP
. completely rewritten MySQL extension
. interoperable XML tools (SimpleXML)
. Embedded database with SQLite
. Exception handling
. Iterators
. First class SOAP implementation

Some of the student sought clarifications on PHP vs ASP and MySQL vs Oracle in terms of technology, features and job opportunities.

A vote of thanks was tendered towards the close of seminar. After the seminar the speakers interacted with the students and addressed their queries. Overall it was a well attended and interactive seminar.

The twincling executive committee puts on record and tenders thanks to Mr. G. Ravinder Reddy and H.O.D. CSE Dept for working together to organize the event and the required infrastructure.