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
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.
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.
When?
Monday, August 18, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Where?
Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd
What?
Lightning Strikes Chickens
The plan this time is to have a bunch of short lightning talks on a range of topics. I'd encourage everyone to bring some small topic they can rant about for 5 minutes. Sign up on the whiteboard at the start of the meeting. 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 sweet.
To give you a taste, those who have stuck their hand up for spots so far include:
- Nick Partridge and Ben Hoskings - Git Collaboration Via GitHub.
- Nigel Rausch - The Value of Fixtures.
- Paul O'Keeffe - TextMate: Beginner's Mind.
- Angus Scown - What Testing Added to Version 2 of My Project.
- John Jeffery - A Non-Religious Comparison of Grails and Rails.
- Nigel Rausch - Has Many To Has Many Thing.
- Paul O'Keeffe - Mocking Options.
- Nigel Rausch - RailsCamp #4 and Jelly Announcements.
- Paul O'Keeffe - Rails Resources.
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.
See the Meetup web site for more info.
When?
Monday, July 21, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Where?
Toowong Library, Toowong Village Shopping Centre, Level 3, 9 Sherwood Rd
What?
To The SplunkPhone, Batman!
Coming up this time around:
- Deployment of Rails applications has been a thorny issue for beauracratic organisations. Tom Adams takes us through building and deploying a Rails application under Tomcat using JRuby and Warbler. Should keep those prickly corporates happy. We might even be able to twist Tom's arm to tell us a little about how he iPhone-ised that same application.
- Stuart Fraser will give us a short introduction to Splunk, a tool for gathering up and correlating useful info from your log files and a whole lot more.
- Paul O'Keeffe will cover a couple more of the tools in his testing toolkit, including Mocha and the Rails helper_test plugin.
There's still room for anyone else who's keen to talk about something. I'll happily step aside if need be.
I'll lock in Jackpot for the usual beer and a bite afterwards. There is even a possibility that we may have a sponsor this time to help fund the frivolity.
Once again, it would be nice to have a connection to The Tubes, so if anyone can bring along a dongle, that would be great.
See the Meetup web site for more info.
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.
See the Meetup web site for more info.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.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.
