Austin On Rails

Howdy Folks

This month we're going to have a product demonstration of ActionItem, a social tasking application developed by a local Rails startup. Mark Roberts and Guy Howe will be delivering the presentation.

Mr. Roberts, president of ActCentric Corporation, is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of progressive management, sales, and technical experience in information technology, with a special focus on open systems enterprise storage. Guy Howe is a primary developer on ActionItem, which is implemented in Ruby on Rails.

ActionItem.com is a new web service under development that is designed for agile group collaboration. ActionItem.com is intended to replace using email and spreadsheets for managing tasks, while having a much lower barrier to adoption than formal project management tools. The service can support any type of project that involves 2 or more people for 2 or more days. Their primary focus is the area of 'ad-hoc collaboration' in which teams quickly form and collaborate on tasks such as planning, events, document writing and review, and other tasks relevant to high-value knowledge workers.

We're also excited to have Mike Perham from FiveRuns give us a demo of JRuby and Glassfish.

Mike is a Software Engineer at FiveRuns. He's also a member of the Apache project and has been developing open source software since 1995. He loves racing motorcycles and learning new technologies, especially anything that makes building web-based applications easier.

JRuby/Glassfish provides an alternative to Mongrel and Nginx, and allows you to mix Ruby and Java like peanut butter and chocolate.

Our meeting will be held at Frog Design at 8th and Congress.

Beverages and socialization practice to follow the meeting at Hickory Street.

Looking forward to seeing everyone out there!

Scheduling Note

We will be meeting at our typical location for our monthly meetings (Frog Design at 8th and Congress). We will run the meeting roughly from 7PM-9PM, so please be on time. Also, please note that our September meeting is on Monday (directly after Lone Star conference is over). This meeting date was chosen to accommodate our visitor from Amazon's tight schedule.

Rails EC2 Plugin

Steve Odom revisits his ElasticRails plugin that makes it simple to deploy your Rails app to Amazon EC2.

Steve's hobby is creating rails applications that no one visits. Sites like smarkets.net, trivionomy.com, and quizical.net. He's also created a couple of rails plugins; s3cache and elasticrails. One day he hopes to create something popular so he can quit his dayjob. He can be reached at steve.odom at gmail.com

AWS + ROR = Development Bliss

Amazon spent ten years and over $2 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched eleven services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 265,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

In this session, Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon web services, is going to provide an overview of some of the Amazon Web services and demo some cool apps that are built using Ruby on Rails. Additionally, We will see a demo of how a typical Rails application can built to “Auto-scale” that simply “listens” to incoming requests/second and makes a smart “educated guess” of how many more steady-state servers are needed to serve the increased load and actually automatically spawn that many virtualised instances, without any human intervention.

This session will highlight some of the newly launched features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and newly launched Amazon Flexible Payment Service (Amazon FPS) and show how you can monetize your existing services.

As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, Jinesh Varia helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way businesses compete. He is focused on furthering awareness of web services and often helps developers on 1:1 basis in implementing their own ideas using Amazon’s innovative services. Jinesh has over 7 years experience in XML and Web services and has worked with standard working groups in XBRL. Prior to joining Amazon as an evangelist, he held several positions in UBmatrix including Solutions Architect, Enterprise Team Lead and Software engineer, working on various XBRL-based financial services projects including ASP.NET based Call Modernization Project at FDIC. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh’s publications have been published in ACM and IEEE. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Penn State University. He plays tennis and loves to trek.

Socialization Practice

Drinks and what not to follow at Hickory Street. Don't miss it!

Greetings Austin Railers,

We're going to do a 1-2 combo punch this month with some more introductory Rails material as a warmup to some very interesting details from the S3 implementation at 37Signals.

Edward Cruz has signed on to continue his talk from last month leading us deeper into the Rails rabbit hole.

Marcel Molina, Jr. will lead us through his OSCON 2007 talk about his experiences implementing S3 at 37Signals. In the fall of 2006, 37signals moved all the uploads they had on their Basecamp and Campfire applications to S3. Migrating around five million files revealed a set of unexpected challenges. In the end, going with S3 was a big win, but it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed at the outset. This talk will go over what questions you'll have to answer and issues you'll have to deal with when moving your infrastructure over to S3 that you might not have expected.

David Bluestein will be emceeing the meeting this month.

So please come on out and join us on August 7th from 7-9PM at Frog Design (8th and Congress). Beverages and what not to follow at Hickory Street.

Greetings Austin Railers!

This month, we're going to do a block of member mini-presentations again. I've received some feedback that the group is sometimes difficult to navigate for newbies because our typical talks often assume an existing understanding of many aspects of Rails. Naturally, it is difficult to please everyone. We need to strike some kind of balance. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume a basic understanding of Rails for our talks, and on the other I want to help encourage those who are just coming to Rails to get off on the right foot. I'd like our group to be a resource to both newbies and ninjas alike. It seems like a noble goal anyway. :)

So for part one of the evening, we are going to call it "If I Met A NEWB On The Street, What Would We Talk About?"

Lightning Talks:

• Creating a Rails Project in SVN and Setting Up Capistrano (Steve Odom)
• Controllers and Views: What's the Deal? (Edward Cruz)
• The Basics of Active Record (Mars Hall)
• Getting Started with Rails Migrations (Damon Clinkscales)
• Intro to irb and console (Damon Clinkscales)
• Rails Security Tip: CSRF & CSRFkiller (Tom Brown)

I am grateful to those of you who have stepped up and offered to present.

For the second slot of the evening, we are very fortunate to have Bret Pettichord, a testing expert who has recently returned to Austin, speak to us about Watir. Watir is written in Ruby and is one of the more popular Ruby libraries. It was actually written before Rails and was designed to be a general-purpose testing tool, suitable for web applications regardless of implementation technology.

Bret will be presenting a Watir demo that is based on the Depot Rails application developed in the Agile Rails book and describing how you can use Watir with Rails apps.

Bret Pettichord has been programming in Ruby since 2003. He is the lead developer of the Watir testing tool and the test architect at Dovetail. Since 2000, he has hosted the Austin Workshop on Test Automation . He is also co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a Jolt-award finalist.

We look forward to seeing you there. The meeting is at Frog Design and 8th and Congress. Beverages and What Not to follow at Hickory Street.

Greetings Austin Railers!

For June, we will have a RailsConf recap from those of you who attended the 2nd Annual Rails Conference in Portland. Fun times!

We will also have a presentation from Mike Perham on ActiveScaffold, a Rails plugin for generating AJAXy CRUD.

Writing a web-based data entry UI for a complex application is never fun and quite often tedious. One key attribute for a good user interface is consistency but it still takes a knowledgeable and diligent development team to create the web pages which follow through on that design. ActiveScaffold is a plugin for Ruby on Rails (aka Rails) which provides dynamic model-based view generation. Instead of having to create pages by hand which display your models, ActiveScaffold will introspect your ActiveRecord models and dynamically generate a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface for managing those objects.

Mike Perham is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM working on the WebSphere Business Services Fabric. He's a member of the Apache project and has been developing open source software since 1995. He loves racing motorcycles and learning new technologies, especially anything that makes building web-based applications easier.

As per usual, we will meet in the lovely space at Frog Design on 8th and Congress. Thanks Frog!