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.

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.

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.

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.