Padre-IDE

Five days CeBit 2010 are over now. Perl was lucky to be one of 15 open source projects who got a booth for free, sponsored by the CeBit and Linux New Media.

Facts about CeBit 2010:

• 334.000 visitors
• 4.157 exhibitors from 68 countries
• 3% more visitors per day (until friday)
• 80% business visitors (until friday)

(source: http://www.cebit.de)

The first two days were the most successful ones in terms of business contacts and interest in Perl.

Wednesday to friday also went good on contacts even if the amount of private visitors increased a little bit each day.

Saturday was mostly private day, many young people came to our booth and asked about Perl.

We planned to…

…introduce Perl to the companies we may meet there. Three special project days were planned for Padre, Foswiki and OTRS where people of these projects planned to be at the booth. We also had beermats of DBIx::Class, Moose and Catalyst, some Tuits and many many marketing papers for distribution.

We failed on…

…bringing Perl into the companies because we learned that most companies already use Perl; for many applications like

• basic network management
• oneliners for quick testing
• data conversion
• preprocessing high volume print job data
• many things in banking business
• telecommunication and internet processing
• health data processing and analysis

If I’d write down the company names for each sample, you’d be as surprised as we were, but most people visiting us were developers or IT managers and they’re usually not allowed to give us permission to write that their company uses Perl.

Some few companies refused to be published at all for security reasons and I will respect this, but the other Perl::Staff people and I are in contact with the people we meet and I hope that we’ll be able to publish the first company names with official approval during the next week.

We learned…

…many things including that we brought something for every visitor to our booth:

• Developers currently using (Visual) Basic, PHP or Phyton were mostly interested to hear about Perl and Padre
• Java, C++ and C developers usually liked the idea that Perl could easily test their programs because most of them didn’t do any automated tests at all
• All the OOP people (Java, C++ and others) were really impressed about Moose
• Everybody using SQL statements wondered how much DBIx::Class could speed up their development
• Most developers found Padre interesting (except of one guy using the Progress language which currently isn’t supported)
• Businessmen not developing themself were impressed that Foswiki is able to limit read and/or write access to documents to users or groups and could be used for employees, the public homepage and printing brochures and manual books without maintaining three individual copies of the same document
• A women leading the account department of her company confirmed heavily that customers like to write mails to the wrong department, ask the same things multiple times each day and love to write question mails without and required information. We “sold” her OTRS which manages incoming requests, has groups, allows tracing of who-did-what-and-when and simple forwarding of requests to the correct group while terms of open source “sold” stands for “promised to download and try it”
• It’s easier to actually run a booth even on such a big event like CeBit than we expected, but
• it’s much more tiering to run a booth on such a big event like CeBit than we expected.

It was really nice…

to meet szabgab, reneeb, getty and the other Perl::Staff people in reality.

Szabgab and I had interesting discussions in the evening, some new ideas were born and I learned many things about Perl, the Perl community and Perl-related tools on the net.

Getty donated some Vodka to Hessen (actually to their booth people) and also enjoyed the other after-CeBit-parties (I think).

Final results and thanks

We talked to some of the people from other projects and Britta from Linux New Media while packing our things together on Saturday evening and most of them (including us) said that Perl was “the winner” of this event. I think we were one of the projects getting the most visiters within the Open Source Lounge, learned very much about running a booth and Perl usage.

Very big thanks go to Andreas “ads”, the Postgres guy, he told us about the OpenSource Lounge and how to get there.

Also thanks to reneeb and szabgab for organizing everything and Britta from Linux New Media for inviting us and arranging an unplanned lighting talk for szabgab.

Currently, we all would like to meet again on CeBit 2011…