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.
See the Meetup web site for more info.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!
When?
Tomorrow! (27th March 2008 @ 6:30PM)
Where?
Thoughtworks: Level 11, 155 Queen Street, Melbourne (SMS Mark on 0414 740 489 if you have trouble getting in)
What?
- Mike Bailey on Deprec 2
- Ben Teese on Flex & Rails
Marcus Crafter will also give a short rundown on the recent Rubinius Sprint held in Sydney.
Pizza will be provisioned by thoughtful Thoughtworks, and we'll hit the local afterwards for an amber (or two).
New comers are supremely welcome. It'll be a cracker I'm sure!
When?
Monday, March 17, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Where?
Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd
What?
Git Yerself Sum' JavaScript
Working in the Ruby and Rails worlds means becoming proficient with a raft of surrounding tools and languages. This month, we'll sample tools from two such areas.
First up, Dr Nic will introduce us to the brave new world of Javascript testing in Rails. He has been blazing a trail though this territory, updating existing tools and creating new ones where there were none to fill the need. He'll step up to show us the results.
Next in line, Alan Harper will be presenting an introduction to Git, the decentralised source control system which is currently a favourite amongst well known Ruby on Rails developers. We have seen a little of Git before, but Alan will take us further, based on his recent experiences with the tool.
We will also have one copy of the Git Peepcode video to give away on the night, sponsored by Peepcode.
Afterwards, we'll head just down the road to Jackpot for some Asian delicacies and Oriental lagers in a beautiful outdoor setting. Think of it as a good chance to schmooze with your fellow geeks.
See the Meetup web site for more info.It looks like the first camp for 2008 has been organised and we’re all very excited about it.
When
After careful consideration we decided that April was cutting it a bit fine for us to be able to organise a camp, so we’ve scheduled Rails Camp 08 for June 20th-June 23rd.
Where
The camp will be held in a beautiful location in Brisbane Water National Park, one hour north of Sydney, for more details head on over to the wiki.
Registration
If you’re familiar with the concept and just want to sign-up, jump straight through to the registration page
Looking forward to seeing you all in June.
(Copied and edited from Ben Askins Google group announcement)
Whoah
Got another awesome line up planned for this Month
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
- Lachie Cox on “Mocking your apps”
- Geoff Evason on “Accepting payments (using PayPal and ActiveMerchant)”
- Cameron Barrie on “5 minutes of method_missing”
Lightning Demos (5min!)
- shoaib on ” some plugins and generators for creating mapping web apps”
- Adam Salter on “Ramaze”
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, 11th March 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Where?
Moores Brecknock Hotel – 401 King William Street, Adelaide.
NOTE The Kitchen’s closed at the Brecknock due to renovations. However, Bar’s still open and we still have use of the projector – so same old same old…
We’ll try and start more “on time-ish” and for any hungry railers interested we’ll organise to go for pizza afterwards somewhere nearby.
What? ExtJS!
ExtJS is an OpenSource javascript framework with ALL the bells and whistles – their tag line is “Documentation. Design. Clean Code. A foundation you can build on”.
If you’re already using Prototype/Scriptaculous – don’t worry – it can use those libs (adapted to via an adapter) or alternatively, use Yahoo UI!, JQuery or it’s own internal lib.
Anthony Richardson will present on the progress of a rails OpenSource ExtJS plugin that he and Alex (amongst other people) are working on.
Specifically he’ll be presenting on:- the work he’s done on the integration of ExtJs layouts ( example layout http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/layout/complex.html ) and Rails layouts/views.
- Hooking the Rails rendering process to inject divs and javascript code automatically.
- “compiling” layout definitions into a single large javascript file to reduce each requests size.
- extacting embedded ruby within the ExtJs layouts to execute on each request and passed as parameters to the layouts precompiled and already on the client machine.
Also, he can demo some other Extjs plugins to give an idea of where their plugin is going. Plus, a refresher on the grid code that Alex did that is currently being rewritten by Alex to make more Rails like (he did a brief demo at the end of a meeting a few months ago).
Also Alex is interested in talking about:- A brief overview of extjs’s features and why you might want to choose it over the other frameworks
- The Grid, and how the next version is going to work.
