Format
- Anablog
- Marty Andrews - Automated Code Quality Checking In Ruby And Rails
- Pizza
- Lightning talks †
- Glen Maddern - “RubyOSA”
- Ben Schwarz - “Sinatra, Rack and Middlewares”
- Daniel Neighman - “Receiving email eventfully”
- Drinks
Venue
Thoughtworks IOOF Building : Level 15, corner of Elizabeth and Collins Street For lift access past 6:30 SMS Mark Ryall on (0414 740 489)
† Lightning talks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Talk)
Thursday April 30th, 2009, 6:30pm
Lightning Talks
- Gareth Townsend – “Mass assignment”
- Ben Schwarz – “Smoke and pipes”
- Daniel Neighman – “rack-auth”
- “James Healy” – “eventmachine hacking”
Why you should attend
- It’ll be awesome
Venue (New venue!)
Horse Bazaar 397 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne 3000 http://www.horsebazaar.com.au
- Jamis is no longer supporting Capistrano, net::ssh, etc.
- Thanks for all your hard work Jamis! You’re awesome!
- Deprec 2 is on Rubyforge. Buy Mike a beer and he’ll tell you all about it.
- RailsCamp bookings are open. 150 spots all up.
- Edge Rails
- Now has find in batches support
- render method is now smarter, and can figure out what it’s rendering automagically
- Nested model mass assignment
- Inside scoop: mod_rails will be available for nginx
- Sinatra is cool
- Amnesia monitors memcache servers, written in Sinatra
After much discussion on the state of the Ruby world, we’ve decided to try something a little different for future meetings: we’re going to have a different person run each meeting, and we’re going to experiment wildly with the format.
Brent Snook has generously agreed to run the next one, and is going to run an Iron Chef meets Ruby Hacking night. A theme ingredient, along with more details, will be announced soon, and it’ll be a chance for everyone to come and show off their l33t Ruby skills.
A couple of other points of consensus:
- We’d like to try more hands-on stuff in the meetings
- We’d like to have the topics be driven more by what people want, rather than just whatever anyone wants to talk about
- A couple of in-demand topics: Sinatra, Cucumber, testing in general
A short one this month, thanks to the Christmas break, and the extreme heat.
We put off our meta-discussion until next meet as well, although it seems to be continuing happily on the list.
- Conferences, conferences, conferences
- There will be no official Railsconf Europe this year!
- RailsConf in Vegas conference will have CabooseConf sponsored by O’Reilly
- The magic discount code to use is “rc09usrg”
- Stixcamp on the 14th and 15th of March, in central Vic
- Brisbabe Railscamp dates have been set (15th - 18th of May), and it’ll be free
- Talk of doing a surf trip beforehand, hassle Gareth Townsend
- CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, will be in Brisvegas, June 26 & 27
- New release of rdoc, with spiffier templates
- 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
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!
- 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
Hi everyone!
It's the Melbourne Ruby User Group this Thursday (28th of August @ 6:30PM), and it's being held at:
Thoughtworks: Level 11, 155 Queen Street, Melbourne (SMS Mark on 0414 740 489 if you can't scale skyscrapers)
The most awesome speakers are:
- Gareth Townsend on CSS Transforms, Transitions and Animations.
- Adam Meehan on make_resourceful, a restful controller plugin for Rails.
- Mark Ryall on Iron Ruby Silverlight 2!
There'll be a re-run of 'Pizza: Thoughtworks Edition' and probably (er, most likely) drinks afterwards. Remember we get 'mates rates' at the Chaise Lounge! Ruby Noobies are welcome and it'll be ace I'm sure. See you there!
A particularly good meeting this month! It ran long, but everyone was so enthralled by the talks that they didn’t mind. Thanks to Marcus and the mysterious Tim for talking, Ryan for organising, and ThoughtWorks for being fabulous hosts as always.
- Edge Rails stuff:
- i18n built in
- Complex forms, first bits have gone in
- Memoisation
- Jay Fields has a Refactoring Ruby book coming out
- Latest RailsCast is about Thinking Sphinx. Yay for Pat!
- Dr Nic has done rbiphonetest framework for writing iPhone tests in Ruby
- Runs against Cocoa, not iPhone libs, so is a bit…ummm…weird
Thanks to Clifford Heath for taking notes, as I was absent!
RailsConf
- 2000 people - not enough room!
- DHH keynote was good - self-help, non-technical
- Kent Beck - patterns, XP, TDD
- Joel Spolsky - entertaining ala Seinfeld
- No RejectConf, but the unconference wasn’t huge
RailsCamp “My liver hurts”
- gitjour, gemjour, appjour, starjour - See drnic’s blog - Duke
- git.railscamp.net- Gitorious repo
- twonk - Antisocial networking
- bittags - social snippets
Sproutcore - advanced MVC JS UI framework - maturing
- Rubygems 1.2 released, fast catalog updating
- MRI vulnerabilities - multiple buffer overruns
- 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!
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!
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
