Ruby on Rails Oceania

When?

Monday, June 16, 2008 at 6:00 PM

Where?

Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd

What?

A Rosy Collection

This month, as usual, we have a variety of interesting bits and pieces to talk about. The line-up is as follows:

• Angus Scown will present JSON, the JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data-interchange format often used in Ruby and Rails applications.
• Paul O'Keeffe will throw out a test driving challenge to the Rails team and all those who create tests using generators.
• Dr Nic Williams has come a long way from the days when he wondered why other developers were so attached to their Macs. He'll show us some RubyCocoa stuff that he's been playing with lately.
• Where time permits, we can discuss some of the new features appearing in Rails 2.0 and 2.1. Nigel Rausch is waiting in the wings with a talk about nested RESTful controllers in Rails 2.x. He may be able to give us a sneak preview.

Afterwards, we'll head down the road to Jackpot for a beer and a bite.

See the Meetup web site for more info.

Late notice, yes! (But it was posted on the group)

Lineup:

• Railsconf ppl on “RailsConf 2008 Roundup”
• Keith Pitty on “Rails 2.1 (101)”
• David Bolton on “Rails at Crossroads – helping more with less”

Location:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room) http://tinyurl.com/2d229a

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

• If anyone ever sends you a link to evilurl.org, ignore it!
• Deploying Rails Apps books is out
• Rubinius is now running Rails!
• IronRuby is too!
• New authentication framework called Lockdown
  • Advanced Rails Recipes book has a recipe for writing your own auth
• If you’re hosting on Debian/Ubuntu, you should look up the recent OpenSSL vulnerability as your ssh and ssl keys may be dodgy
• RailsConf sucks coz we’re not at it
  • But we want videos of the talks anyway
• Rails 2.1 RC 1 is cool (2.1 is officially out since the meeting!)
  • named_scope
  • ActiveRecord partial updates
  • gem dependencies
  • date-stamped migrations
• RedBubble t-shirts are cool

Next meeting will see roundups of everything that happened at RailsConf and RailsCamp, so it should be good!

- There will be Arduinos at railscamp, oh yes there will.

- Lachlan Hardy made mention of RAD a new ruby scripting language for the Arduino. Lachie explained about the open source nature of the project – the conversation then swung around to a workshop that was taking place at UTS on May 31.

- Martin introduced ruby-processing on github - John Resig (ejohn.com) JS implemention of processing _why wrote a translator (Lachie brought it up) it translate ruby byte code to python byte code (Myles chipped in ONLY 1.9 byte code)

- rpm.newrelic.com does pretty graphs

- Dylan suggests using Debian to generate ssh keys is a bad idea (wrt github)

- Lachie lets us know that the github guys released a whole heap of code to get something off the ground

-New specs for JRuby are out (called rubyspec)

- Daniel (the merb guy for aus) released a community site (merbunity.com)

- a new merb blogging engine called feather

- Datamapper for Merb was questioned

- Myles brought up Ezra’s rails branch

- Dylan brought up Scailr is an unknown thing to help you deploy to EC2

When?

Monday, May 19, 2008 at 6:00 PM

Where?

Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd

What?

Done Rails, Now What?

So now that you've got Rails under your belt, you're fishing around for ways to do it better. You're thinking "What am I going to do next?" Well, here's what:

Dr Nic will show us Hobo, a rapid application framework on top of Rails, with the motto "write less code". Consider these features:

• Popular plugin Sexy Migrations, which is now in Rails 2? Originally from Hobo.
• Popular plugin "make_resourceful" - Original from Hobo.
• Automatic migrations - place your schema information in your model.
• Interesting alternate template language: DRYML.

We can then contrast this with Haml and Sass, introduced to us by Alan Harper.

• Haml is an alternative template language for Rails, that cuts down on the verbosity of HTML, and outputs human readable HTML.
• Its partner in crime, Sass (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets), has a similar philosophy to Haml, but applied to CSS rather than HTML. It brings a more powerful, feature rich templating language to the design world.

Afterwards, we'll head down the road to Jackpot for the usual feast of Asian delicacies and Oriental lagers.

Wednesday May 14, 2008

The line up is as follows (email the list if you want to give a talk, or do a lightning demo – don’t make Jason do a 15min stand-up routine, please!):

• Pat Allan on “Sphinx”
• Craig Sharkie on “Keep it Simple Styles”

As per usual, we are at:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

This month’s analog blog:

• AWDWR 3rd edition beta book is available
• mod_rails has been released
• better partials
• Ruby implementers have organised a meeting every 2 weeks to discuss direction. Notes from the first one
  • Specs are getting consolidated across some of them
• Ruby 1.8.7 preview release is out, with a bunch of stuff backported from 1.9
• JRuby 1.1.1 is out
• Ditz is a cool little command line bug tracking app
• Rails is now gitted and lighthoused!
• Rubyflow website for Ruby news
• Idea: RailsEnvy Curmudgeon - RailsEnvy with all the crap jokes taken out
• RubyHeroes - Nominate Ruby folks to get awards at RailsConf
• Summer of code stuff to improve Rails threading
• Google Developer Day in Sydney in June is a few days before Railscamp
• Still a few spots left for Railscamp
  • Party plane is being organised; watch the list

When?

Tomorrow! (24th April 2008 @ 6:30PM)

Where?

Thoughtworks: Level 11, 155 Queen Street, Melbourne (SMS Mark on 0414 740 489 if you have trouble getting in)

What?

• Pat Allan on using Sphinx with Ruby
• Clifford Heath on the ActiveFacts Constellation API - A New Approach to Models

Pizza will be provisioned by thoughtful Thoughtworks, and we'll hit the local afterwards for an amber (or two).

New comers can come for sure! Barrels-o-fun guaranteed!

When?

Monday, April 21, 2008 at 6:00 PM

Where?

Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd

What?

Front-ended

While Rails provides the engine to power your web applications, it generally needs a little help from a variety of technologies on the front end, whether that be the end displaying output to the user (the UI) or the end receiving incoming web requests and dispatching them to Rails. This month, we take a look at the latest tools providing us with the front ends we need.

In "mod_rails: Now why didn't I think of that", Ben Hoskings will share his solution to designing and deploying to a robust and simple production environment using mod_rails, a tidy Apache config, and some capistrano for good measure.

Tony O'Hagan will present the ExtJS framework for building rich user interfaces. Here's his blurb:

Over the past few years an ever growing number of AJAX frameworks have emerged. Now a few dominant players are starting to grab most of the attention from web developers. One of these is ExtJS, a mature Javascript class library that allows you to build rich UI apps with almost no HTML or CSS code.

In this presentation we'll briefly compare different AJAX architectures and specifically how they contrast with Rails/RJS. We'll then drill into the ExtJS framework stack exploring the lower-level utility Javascript classes up to the higher level data and UI components. We'll then give a quick UI component demo followed by a show and tell of code snippets and a code up of an ExtJS web app. Finally, we'll explore how to integrate ExtJS into Rails to create the killer app duo.

Jackpot, as usual, for afters - Asian delicacies and Oriental lagers in a beautiful outdoor setting, as long as the weather is kinder to us this time.

Time for the second installment of Ruby on Rails Oceania - Perth Edition.

It's once again at the Silicon Beach House:

I think we should have some presentations this month, so bring you laptop and your speaking shoes. Oh, and if someone wants to put their hand up to buy a carton, that would be much appreciated.

See you then.

This one caught up on us while we weren’t looking! It’s on a new night for this month only!

Tuesday April 8, 2008

Two five minute demos are lined up:

• Tim Lucas on “Securing your source code using encrypted volumes”
• Myles Byrne on “Abusing git for fun and profit” (Two things: backing up your db with git (& cap) and backing your models with git (& files))

And a single presentation by Tim!

• Tim Lucas on “OpenID”

If anyone has something to share, post it up on the list!

As per usual, we are at:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

When?

Tuesday, 8th April 6:30pm – 8:30pm

Where?

Moores Brecknock Hotel – 401 King William Street, Adelaide.

NOTE The Kitchen’s back open!! Yay!

What? GIT + Rails Servers

Luke Sutton will kick things off by presenting on his experience with GIT. He’s using it for all of his personal projects, including contributing to a few other projects which also use it. Since a number of local Rubyists have lately shown a lot of interest in Git and/or other distributed version control systems, I think this will generate some good discussion.

A wikiapedia snippet… “I’m an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.” (Linus Torvalds)

From the git home page: “Git is distributed version control system focused on speed, effectivity and real-world usability on large projects.” ...come along to see what all the fuss is about.

Next, Adam Davies will present a round-up of the current crop of rails servers.

The plan is to run through some of the various options that are now available – while Mongrel seems to have become the standard, a number of newer projects are cropping up. Thin and Ebb both leverage some core mongrel libraries and rack – a minimal interface between webservers supporting Ruby and Ruby frameworks. In addition, JRuby is now stable (1.0 and 1.1RC are out) and is another choice for deployments.

Hot on the heals of last month’s analog blog, here’s this month’s:

• RailsCamp number 3 selling fast!
• JRuby 1.1RC3
• Sapphire = fork of Ruby
• MacRuby - Apple trying to make Ruby even more of a first-class development language
• modrails - Apache module to run Rails
• has_finder plugin is so brilliant that it’s been merged into edge Rails
• Rails core team reshuffle, including a few who’ve left
• A good explanation of the internals of Rubinius
• Steve Hayes says current BackgroundDRb works well, in spite of shambolic documentation
  • If you’ve got a hosting environment you know you’ll be using, make sure you try out stuff like this before you build around it!
• Time travel plugin

Our talks for the evening were:

Ben Teese gave a talk and demo of using Flex with Rails. It all looks pretty straightforward, largely thanks to Rails to_xml method making it pretty easy to spit out data in a format that Flex likes.

Marcus Crafter gave a quick rundown on the recent Rubinius Sprint which was a resounding success. Rubygems now works with Rubinius, so you can find out which of your favourite gems don’t!

Mike Bailey gave a demo of Deprec 2. It’s not backwards compatible, but it now supports Monit, plus newer versions of Ubuntu. It’s also a lot neater and easier to extend.

Thanks, as always, to ThoughtWorks for hosting and feeding us pizza, and thanks to Ryan Allan for organising the talks.

Just in time for this meetup, here are the notes from the last one! (Hey, it’s better than my usual timeframe of not at all.)

• Monkey patching is bad is the new Zed Shaw rant (and should be called Duck Punching anyway)
• rush = Ruby shell replacement
• If you’re thinking about using Mephisto or something, they’re crap, so use Enkiblog instead (says Xavier, who’s not at all biased)
• alias_method_chain :alias_method_chain, :awesome (or, how I learned to stop worrying and made Python nation and anyone else afraid of monkey-patching my bitch)
• MacRuby
• JRuby 1.1 release candidate 2: lots of bugfixes
• Rails app in a single file
• Rubinius sprint next weekend in Sydney is all sold out! Yay! (Dylan might open up a few more spots)
  • Marcus is trying to organise drinks with Evan one night next week when he’s in Melbourne. He’ll post to the list. (Yep - he did.)
  • Marcus will give us a bit of a summary next meeting. (Yep - he will.)
• Github is now open for business (if you suck up to DrNic for an invite)
• Heroku lets you build and deploy a Rails app entirely in the browser, or you can use your own tools. Uses Amazon cloud for hosting - goal is to pay for hosting by usage.
• JAOO conferences in Brissie and Sydney, and they’re looking for Ruby/Rails people to talk

I [ed: drnic] think it took me months and months to figure out Rails + Ruby a few years ago when I first picked up Rails. I think I learned it/worked at it most nights after work (and probably surreptitiously during a few work days as well).

Lately I’ve received a few emails asking about Rails training courses.

So I’ve organised a “Getting Started with Rails” weekend workshop coming up on the 19th+20th of April, to help anyone else who’s poked around the edges of Rails and now wants to get cracking with it.

The workshop will cover:

• start a new Rails application in 5 minutes
• read and write to a database without using any SQL statements or advanced knowledge
• use the Model-View-Controller method of application design
• create dynamic HTML using the data from the database
• generate models and controllers so you don’t have to type as much yourself
• work with “convention over configuration” – Rails makes a lot of decisions for you!
• write tests for your applications so you know instantly if something has gone wrong

The full price is $795, but the early bird price is only $595 (before end of March; use early as coupon code when booking). Today is 26th of March, so less than a week of early bird prices to go.

For more details and booking see the event page

Other training courses workshops around Australia?

If you are running a Rails/Ruby workshop in Australia, let us know so we can tell everyone!