Monday December 15, 2008 – Christmas Gems (and plugins/BEERS)
Lightning Talks / Lightning Beers
- Left over lightning talks
- Railscamp #5 discussions
- Visit from Santa :)
Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre 6pm Start
Wednesday December 10, 2008 – End of Year Bonanza!
Pressos
- Tim Lucas on ‘Staticish sites with Nanoc and/or Sinatra’
- Ian White on ‘resources_controller’
- Myles Byrne on ’ Javascript Animation via Custom Events and OO Design’
This month we’re at: Trinity Bar – 505 Crown St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 (upstairs)
AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)
- No meeting next month, but we’ll organise drinks on Thursday the 18th
- RailsCamp 4 was teh awesome!
- Next one will be in Queensland next year
- Rails 2.2 is out
- Worth it if you’re using SQL Server for the new adapter
- Thread safe, and has DB connection pooling, so JRuby is looking cooler
- FFI lets you call C in a nice way from Ruby
- Works from JRuby, etc.
- Lets you do callbacks without writing C
- Deprec 2 supports Passenger
- Passenger is getting more popular
- Still has some issues, but 37Signals is running TadaList on it, and are switching other apps
- Craken - Cron meets Rake and Capistrano
- tabtab is Dr Nic’s cool tool for make shell completion easier and more useful
- git also has completions for bash, which you should use
- github gem - command line tools to make working with github super easy
- GitX is a nice Cocoa git viewer
- CouchDB promoted to an Apache incubator project. Is that a good thing?
- twicl is a command line twitter client
The Australian Web Industry Association is hosting this years Perth Web Christmas Party, and the Perth Rails Group is supporting!
Next door to Flying Scotsman
639 Beaufort St
Mt Lawley
Thanks to all presenters and attendees at this month’s meetup, where the lightning talk format proved to be very popular.
- Railscamp 4 rocked
- Railscamp 5 to be in SE Queensland in April 2009
- Merb 1.0 was recently released
- Rails 2.2
- Dr Nic mentioned Rails Test Serving
- DHH’s Rails Myths
- Rubinius team has become smaller
- RubyConf was held last week\
- OSDC next month (2 – 5 Dec)
- Matt mentioned that Thinking Sphinx has become the de facto Rails search tool and that “Pat is chuffed”
- Several Australian teams entered Rails Rumble
- Ben Webster has skinned jobberBase – the opportunity exists to deploy it
Wednesday November 19, 2008
This was supposed to be up a lot earlier, but we’ve have an ordinary response to the call for action! The plan is to have a bonanza lightning talk night!
The current list of who’s talking about what is over at: Wiki (hoping to get 10-15)
So if you want 5min of fame on any topic, you best be heading on over and putting your name down. It can be on anything vaguely Ruby or Rails related. It’s also a low-stress way of learning a bit more about presenting!
- Jason Crane on “Railscamp 4 Roundup”
- Ben Askins Sexy web service consumption with hpricot and openuri
- Adam Salter “websites I’ve known” – or rather one in particular. Challenges and technologies used in making the new business.un.org
- Lachie Cox on “Something or other”
- Keith Pitty on “Railscamp 4: What worked well?; how can we improve?”
- Tim Riley on “Using iUI and Rails to build simple iPhone web apps.”
- Leonard Chin on “Why you should attend RubyKaigi 2009”
- Jason Crane on “Prawn (PDF generation)”
- Brian Menzies on “community outreach project”
- Martin Stannard on “Risque – World Domination with RoR”
- [Chris Hulbert] on “A silly-simple Comet demo – reverse AJAX”
- Dave Newman on “Javascript test coverage”
This month we’re at: Trinity Bar – 505 Crown St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 (upstairs)
AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)
That’s right, now you get two months for the price of one! (Do you like the way I’m making the fact that I forgot to do last month’s sound like a good thing?)
October
- New MacRuby
- Tarantula = big fuzzy spider good for testing XSS
- Ruby VM in Javascript
- Capuccino has been released!
- See 280slides for an example of what you can do with it
- And while we’re on the topic of web-based presentation apps, SlideRocket
- Ghost - free, web-based personal computer
- Prototype alternatives
- Good Javascript books
- Cliff recommends Haxe - cool language that compiles down to JavaScript, Flash, …
- roodi - checkstyle for Ruby
- SAP now has Ruby support (Ruby is doomed!)
- Background processing for Rails
- Mike recommends backgroundjob
- Starling/workling
- Howlr
- Daemon Controller
- EnvyCasts - Nobody has checked them out, so no idea if they’re any good
- StackOverflow - Joel Spolsky, non-crap version of expertsxchange + digg
- Adhearsion - Ruby Asterisk integration
- See also RAGI, which is older and more basic
- Validatable plugin - alidation of an entire hierarchy of objects with errors aggregated at the root object
November
- Releases
- Rails 2.1.2 released to patch a response splitting vulnerability
- Ryan Davis released a pure Ruby parser for Ruby
- Now the default parser in Rubinius
- Rubinius C++ branch is now the default branch (so they’re back where they were 6 months ago)
- Merbcamp videos are online
- Nanite - self assembling fabric of ruby daemons
- SQLServer adapter for Rails is approaching a release candidate
- Mike suggests cool books: Running Xen and O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services
- http://www.slicehost.com/ got bought by Rackspace!, were instantly buried in hail of tweets
- rack-cache enables HTTP caching for Rack-based apps
- Performer.js lets you do greyed-out prompt text in input fields
- Formtastic, Justin French’s awesome form builder, is getting awesomer
- Pat’s Thinking Sphynx peepcode - Go Pat!
Tuesday, 11th November at 6:30pm – 7:30pm(ish)
Where?
The Sealink Building boardroom (upstairs at 440 King William Street, cnr South Terrace) by 6.30pm. We generally head over to the pub for meals/drinks at around 7.30ish, depending on start time, and length of presso’s.
Come in the front sliding doors of the Sealink building, and someone will be there to lead you to the board room.
What?
Fixtures aren’t fun. Trying to do model tests utilising them leads to problems…
Data in fixture files…
- are effectively global … leads to brittle tests (changing a single attribute breaks a bunch of tests)
- reduces the self-contained readability of tests
- leads to tedious and error-prone setup when you have complex object graphs
One idea to help improve the situation is to use object factories—code that helps generate models with fake data, but for which overriding attributes can be easily set. I’ll demonstrate the idea and then show how much easier it is to do with a collection of gems.
When?
Monday, Ocsober 15, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Where?
Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd
What?
The Rumble Report
Geoffrey Donaldson is back to pick up from where he left off last time. He'll be talking about SproutCore]. We've already seen CouchDB last time, but here's his combined spiel:
CouchDB and Sproutcore are 2 new projects that's haven't yet reached a 1.0 release, but are both catching the eyes of many developers. Sproutcore is being deemed Cocoa for the web, as it brings many desktop programming techniques to the browser, such as bindings, Key/Value keying and MVC. CouchDB is a 'new age' storage engine, based on storing schema free documents, instead of rows. This not a replacement for our beloved relational databases, but in many cases, actually suites our needs better. We'll be looking at how both of these work, where they might fit in, how to use them with ruby, and briefly touch on how they might all work together.
By popular demand, Geoffrey will also be giving a lightning talk on how he uses Keynote to do his spiffy presentations.
On top of this, we'll be having a couple of the teams from the weekend's Rails Rumble presenting their applications and describing the experience of building a Rails application in 48 hours, while living inside Dr Evil's War Room with a Fat Bastard.
Arjen Lentz will be plugging OurDelta, the place to go for MySQL builds.
If we have any other lightning talks in the wings, we'll just have to see if we can fit them in. Its a pretty full agenda already.
Afterwards, we're off to Jackpot.
I'll have my laptop set up ready to go for anyone who needs it. If someone can supply access to the tubes, then that would be gratefully accepted.
See the Meetup web site for more info.
Tuesday, 14th October at 6:30pm – 8:30pm(ish)
Where?
Like last time, we’ll again be in The Sealink Building (440 King William Street, cnr South Terrace) by 6.30pm then head over to the pub for meals/drinks at around 7.30ish, depending on start time, and length of presso’s.
Come in the front sliding doors of the Sealink building, and someone will be there to lead you to the board room – it’s upstairs.
What?
Anthony Richardson will be presenting on an interesting deployment setup:
I can cover my experience using cruisecontrol.rb + github + slicehost to auto-deploy to a staging server on a push to github from my development environment (after the build passes automated tests).
I can also show using asset_packer to optimise js + css delivery (reduce my app from about 28 js files to 1).
I have also just started to look at the “NewRelic” RPM plugin for Rails that gives you nice performance monitoring in development as well as a production monitoring solution (works best with Internet access).
See you there!
Wednesday October 8, 2008
Sorry to all those who read the blog for notification of the next meetup. We’re a bit light on content this month, but it should still be a rocking evening.
Lightning Demos
- Tim Lucas on ‘Cucumber and Factory Girl’
- Carl Woodward on ‘Great Test Debate – Findings (mate!)’
Pressos
- Tim Lucas on ‘Web Directions, and WebJam Lowdown’
- Nathan de Vries on “The Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain (tips and tricks for bringing the mobile web to phones)”
This month we’re at: Trinity Bar – 505 Crown St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 (upstairs)
AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)
When?
Monday, September 15, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Where?
Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd
What?
The Mile DRY Club
Its shaping up like we'll combine one longer talk from Geoffrey Donaldson on SproutCore and CouchDB with a few lightning talks on Ruby/Rails testing (Test::Unit, RSpec, Mocha, Shoulda, and so on). Here's the blurb from Geoffrey:
CouchDB and Sproutcore are 2 new projects that's haven't yet reached a 1.0 release, but are both catching the eyes of many developers. Sproutcore is being deemed Cocoa for the web, as it brings many desktop programming techniques to the browser, such as bindings, Key/Value keying and MCV. CouchDB is a 'new age' storage engine, based on storing schema free documents, instead of rows. This not a replacement for our beloved relational databases, but in many cases, actually suites our needs better. We'll be looking at how both of these work, where they might fit in, how to use them with ruby, and briefly touch on how they might all work together.
The lightning talk action from the mailing list goes like this so far:
- Nic Williams - Shoulda gem + rails plugin, which is an extension of the test/unit test framework.
- Alan Harper - thinking_sphinx.
- Paul O'Keeffe - Mocking options.
- Stuart Coyle - Mocking + stubbing with rSpec and why it makes fixtures *almost* redundant, followed by a biff between the Shoulda and Rspec camps, and then maybe another between the mock and fixture camps.
- Bodaniel Jeanes - Dapper.net.
- Bodaniel Jeanes - find_by_association.
- Paul O'Keeffe - Why rake stats is a Little White Lie.
- Larry Stewart-Zerba - Rails:Beginners Mind from a Java Developer.
- Alan Harper - factory_girl.
- Paul O'Keeffe - TextMate: Beginner's Mind.
If you have anything else you'd like to talk about, sign up on the whiteboard at the start of the meeting. We will vote for talks and then run them in order of those with the most votes, fitting in whatever we can until everyone gets hungry/thirsty. Then its off to Jackpot.
I'll have my laptop set up ready to go for anyone who needs it. If someone can supply access to the tubes, then that would be very nice.
Credit goes to Ben Hoskings for this month's meeting title. This is the moniker we'll be using for the 13 RailsCampers as they wing their way to Adelaide.
See the Meetup web site for more info.
- Tim reported that Webjam will be held on Thursday 25th September
- register at the site
- opportunity to present
- gonged after 3 minutes
- Geoff told us about the Startup camp that was held recently
- next one in Jan
- see http://startup.australia.org
- Railscamp 4 is on in November in the Adelaide Hills
- bunks sold out (campsites still available)
- Radar is organising transfer from airport
- Railsconf Europe was held recently
- Envycasts are available from the guys who do the Rails Envy Podcast
- Carl vouched for them
- Merbcamp (not really a camp) will be held in San Diego
- go *camp!
- A Rails conference to be held in Brazil (Dr Nic speaking)
- Matta reported that Rails 2.1.1 had been released and that another Ruby vulnerability had been found
- Linc told us about Rails 2.2 goals, which include being threadsafe
- Noel reported that a patch had been made available for rack to fix cross-site request forging
- Matta told us that the caching solution that he, Ben Shwartz and Dan had developed at Railscamp 3 for merb had been released!!!
- Keith reported that Work at Jelly has been rejuvenated on the Central Coast
As half of the WA Rails community have moved into a little office in Leederville, we thought it fitting to throw a Rails meetup at Fibber McGees in celebration.
Where: 711 Newcastle St, Leederville (Over the road from the Leederville hotel), Thursday 18th of September, from 5pm(ish). We'll most probably by in the back restaurant area.
- faster_from_xml Rails plugin = much faster XML deserialisation
- Rails 2.2 will be thread safe!
- Mongrel will be able to run multiple threads, but you'll still need a thread per CPU
- JRuby will be able to run multiple real-OS threads
- Rails 2.2 will have i18n built in!
- There's a demo site and the source for it
- Cucumber = replacement for RSpec story runner, will replace story runner
- Blog post on Mike Bailey's blog on cherry picking changes from git
- Never Block = library that's using Ruby 1.9 fibres to make sure SQL queries don't block your web app
- RailsEnvy guys are putting about their screencasts
- haxe.org = open source flash compiler, better way of writing flash
- Videos of talks from Ruby Hoedown are available. Good ones are:
- Chris Wanstrath's talk about Github
- Giles Bowkett one on Archaeopteryx, MIDI generation in Ruby
- REXML denial-of-service, there's a hotfix, or you can upgrade to Rails 2.1.1
- Post on Rails On The Run about how Rubyists don't scale
- IE8 beta 2 is out
