Austin On Rails

Merry Christmas! Oops wait…wrong month. It’s 2010 folks…and it’s shaping up to be a good one for the Austin Rails community. Our community is stronger now than ever and we’ll continue with our work (ha! we are coding in Ruby after all) this year.

Howdy everyone!

Due to the Christmas holiday, we will be having a social event in lieu of a standard meeting. Normal meeting schedule resumes in January!

Party!

It’s time for the Second Annual Austin on Rails / Refresh Austin party and this time the fine folks of WordPress Austin will join us as co-hosts. Even better, the first 100 people to join us at the party will get a free drink thanks to our neighbor Rackspace (they’re right down the road in San Antonio).

Ping @damon if one of these topics interests you.

Videos:

Please enter your favorite technical videos on the wiki so we can all benefit from them.

Meeting is tomorrow. Rock on.

Due to the the Thanksgiving holiday our meeting has been moved up this month to November 17th. We’ve got an awesome meeting this month and we hope you can make it out!

Many people who love git have a tendency to get excited by the internals of it; how it does the things that make it so great. For the uninitiated, these details can be intimidating and more than a little opaque. We’ll look at a (very) brief over-view of what git is and isn’t, then get to the more important question to the working developer: “How do I use it?” We’ll look at commonly used commands, discuss various work-flows, and compare and contrast subversion’s ways of doing things. The focus will be on how to get things done, not how does git work.

We’ve got a treat for you this month which is a little bit off the beaten path for us…a talk on MacRuby. It’s definitely a Ruby topic which has a lot of interest in our community, nonetheless.

MacRuby

Ruby is not only a great language for doing web application development, but is garnering great fanfare recently as an new tool for doing full blown applications development for desktop client software as well. Tools like IronRuby on the PC and MacRuby on the Mac make the task of writing a desktop application as fun if not more fun than doing web apps and with many of the same advantages. In this talk we look at MacRuby and how it can be used to create full blown Mac desktop apps while using and talking to many of the same libraries and tools you use to do web apps with Ruby. 

Authlogic

Allen Walker recently needed to implement user authentication and confirmation for www.fadethepublic.com. Authlogic is a very comprehensive login rails gem, but does not explicitly provide for the confirmation of user emails. Without such confirmation, users could sign up with bogus emails, then when the system sends out periodic emails to those accounts, it could be flagged as spam. Authlogic provides a perishable_token field for every user account, which is then used by a third party library called auth_helpers. Authhelpers provides nice framework for email confirmation/validation using the authlogic library. I will explain how to install authhelpers at a basic level and demonstrate the functionality it provides realtime with the website. It’s not entirely bug free and the author is still working on it, but it is usable.

Lance Vaughn is a local Rails developer who wants to do what he can to promote Austin and the Rails communities. As a part of that work, he’s going to be doing some blogging for Austin on Rails. The feature below is a Twitter interview which he recently conducted with Steve Odom about his new Rails-based site, which is launching at DEMO this week in San Diego.

LANCE: Hey, Steve. Thanks for accepting my invitation for a twinterview. I’m looking forward to getting to know more about you and ge.la.to!

Mr. Justin Britten will be your esteemed emcee for the evening and we’ve got a couple of great presentations from the Austin on Rails community lined up.

Installing the Revenue Gem: Subscription Billing in Rails

Actually, there is no such gem!  If only subscription billing in Rails were that easy.  Barry Cox, of TweetRiver, and Justin Britten, of Prefinery, will cover the many options when it comes to collecting money for your Rails app.  They’ll examine Spreedly, CheddarGetter, PayPal, Amazon and even how to roll your own code using ActiveMerchant and a payment gateway.

What should we do for the August meeting? Our fearless leader (wait, that’s me) is going to be out of the country (well not really, but you get the idea). I can’t be at the meeting.

What should we do for the meeting? Who can help out? More mini-talks? Does anyone have an interesting topic up their sleeve?

You’ll have the undying gratitude of your Rails peers if you do something.

Thanks!

This month is all about you. We’re interested to know what you have been building, what have you learned lately, etc. Is there a neat little class you made or a trick you found?

Please step up and share something with the group!

We’ll also be hearing from Ross Andrews about his recent play with the Dhaka Parser Generator for Ruby. Using Dhaka, we will go through building a lexer, parser, and evaluator for a small query language. Then we’ll tempt the demo gods and show a Rails application with a search system that utilizes our new language. No previous knowledge of lex/yacc is required, although a basic understanding of BNF and how a parser works is recommended. Ross Andrews is a Rails developer in Austin. He works for the SuperPoints Network, making Rails and Facebook applications