Open Source Software camp was organized from 5-6th septemper, 2009 at Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology in collaboration with CSI –NSIT. OSS camp is a series of community-driven “unconferences” targeted specifically at promoting FOSS (free and open source software) implementation and development in India. It is India’s largest unconference on open source. They bring together the best brains and the most passionate technologists and enthusiasts under one roof and create a platform for sharing best practices, experiences, and knowledge.
The first day of the camp started on a high note and enthusiasm among participants. There was an introduction round by Mr. Kinshuksunil about Open source and its importance for students and professionals alike. OSS follows the quote “Of the people, for the people, by the people.” i.e. the rights of distribution are free and the source code can be edited as per the requirement of user. The introductory round was followed by talk by Mr. Neerat Bhatnagar who gave a new and interesting concept of doing social work using “Good bytes” which is a platform that allows crowd funding of investigative journalism for specific cases that the crowd votes up for. Then a hand’s on session was given was given in the afternoon on using an open source web framework “Grails”, based on java, to create a simple web application on ubuntu. They demonstrated Grails by developing a form that collects user details and drops them into the database. It clearly demonstrated why Grails is used in place of Java for web app development as its more user friendly and requires much less programming code. An introductory session on Game programming and development was held highlighting C++ and python as coding language. Conceptual issues about 3d physics and graphics fundamentals required for game coding were also outlined and short introduction about Graphic tools DirectX 3D, OpenGL and animation development kits like Maya and simple Flash games was given.
The day 2 session started with discussion on various web development languages like php, python, ruby etc and advantage of each over the other. Ruby is fast, clean, rich in libraries, usable, simple and makes a programmer’s life much simpler as its dynamically typed and highly portable. It was followed by an interesting session on Phing which is a quick and efficient tool for developing and deploying applications on server side. PHing Is Not GNU make; it’s a project build system based on Apache Ant.
Flex – an overview ,presentation was given by Romil Mittal .Flex is an open source framework for creating applications given by Adobe technologies quickly and neatly. It generates a flash kind of execution for an application created with flex. A talk was given by Anil Yadav about Datamogration to MySql. It focused on how migration from Oracle to MySQL was a major advantage. We can also migrate database from any DBMS to MySQL. It is highly flexible and can be customized to quite an extent in migration depending on your needs, demands, user requirement. In the afternoon, a session on “Rules with Drools ” was given . Drools is a business rule management system (BRMS) with a forward chaining inference based rules engine, more correctly known as a production rule system, using an enhanced implementation of the Rete algorithm. A short presentation was carried on SCALA which is “java as it should be”.
The OSS camp was a huge success with more than 150 people from al over India participating in it n sharing there knowledge and ideas under the same roof. The camp highlighted various aspects of OSS, discussion on projects done on OSS, interaction among the participants thus laying down a foundation for a hub of enthusiasts, professionals and newbie.