Ruby on Rails Oceania

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.