Come on out this month to Datran Media at 7th and Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators; head to the 8th floor) to catch a tutorial on state machines and pick up some new Ruby ORM skills. As we tend to do, we will be meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month to discuss Ruby and Rails for a couple of hours. Afterwards we will adjourn to the local pub to continue the conversations. Make sure you arrive a bit early to get a good spot!

Crossing State Lines on Rails

Donald Wilde got into programming from a desire to control his trains as a kid. He never has gotten around to doing that (though he's helped his Dad do so), but he's programmed just about everything else from wire handling machinery to voice-operated VCR controllers. Since 1997, he's been involved with web programming and FOSS as a contributor and a consumer.

State Machines have been a cornerstone of systems design for a lot longer than transistors and the Gang of Four. After a rapid tour of the basics to get you thinking, we'll get into the meat of the presentation: an examination of two different Ruby implementations with practical demonstrations in a Rails environment. Don will leave you inspired to consciously add state machine design to your Controller toolbox and point you to starting points for learning more.

DataMapper: Tomorrow's ORM Today

The boys from Bryan are back and this time their talking about DataMapper, an ORM modeled after that other pattern by Martin Fowler. DataMapper is an alternative to ActiveRecord with some lofty goals of its own. Fast, thread-safe, and feature rich, DataMapper would be downright enterprisy, if it weren't for all the innovation they're cooking up. DataMapper is a primo example of an ORM that has evolved beyond the typical relational database setup.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. They use Merb + DataMapper as their primary web stack on all new projects.

Come on out and join us!

Greetings Austin Railers

Another hot Austin summer is in full swing and we've got another smokin' meeting for you to boot! Except this time, you are the star. Yes folks, it's true...it's time for another round of lightning talks where you tell us what's up. In addition, we've got some boys from College Station (that hotbed of crackling technological firepower) coming down to give us a preview of their Lone Star talk on Merb, the most popular of the Rails alternative Ruby web frameworks.

Meeting Location

Datran Media - 7th & Brazos (just inside the doors, there is a bank of elevators. head to the 8th floor) Always good to arrive early to get a spot!

Lightning Talks!

For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. :-) We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework

Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

In Other News

I've got some good news on the book front. At RailsConf, I made a connection with Pearson and they've sent me their Ruby Professional Series. This includes The Ruby Way and The Rails Way. So look out for some good book giveaways! I've also got versions for the library, so if somebody wants to borrow one, let me know.

Your monthly socialization practice will follow the meeting at B.D. Riley's pub.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the meeting. Glad to be back!

Upcoming Events

As a side note, there are a couple of Ruby/Rails related events coming up here in Austin that you might want to register for:

Rails Bootup (August 2nd) - if you are newer to Ruby on Rails and would like to get up and running, check out this bootcamp that I am putting on with the help of some of my esteemed colleagues. Why not speed up your learning and spend a Saturday learning Rails?

Lone Star Ruby Conf (September 4-6) - this was a killer show last year and it looks to be a good one this year as well. And they've got Matz, the creator of Ruby, speaking at the conference!

Eric Falcao's Client-Side Performance in Rails

and

Steven Smith's What's New in Rails 2.1 [PDF]

UPDATE: Location: DATRAN MEDIA in the Omni Hotel Bldg. (7th & Brazos) - 8th floor - either meet by elevators or if they are unlocked, head on up!

Folks, we've got a stunningly good meeting lineup this month. In fact, it's safe for you all to come back after you skipped my talk last time. ;-) I am sad to say that I actually won't be able to attend this month's meeting, as I'll be in the Bay Area at Velocity Conference. I am leaving the emcee duties in Josh Baer's capable hands. If you are wanting to keep up to date with Rails or performance tweak some existing apps, you *must* come out to the meeting this time.

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization by Eric Falcao

Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1? by Steven Smith

Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

ORM Deathmatch!

by Mike Perham

ActiveRecord isn't the only game in town when it comes time to access your database with Ruby. We'll take ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, put them in a steel cage match to the death and see who emerges victorious. Attendees in the first three rows might get bloody so bring a poncho.

Mike is a Ruby developer at FiveRuns and faints at the sight of blood.

Sinatra - a Tiny Ruby Web Framework

by Damon Clinkscales

There are times when Rails seems like massive overkill, but you would still like to use Ruby goodness. This is especially true when your entire web site idea can be contained inside one file. We'll take a look at the features of Sinatra and play around with a sample application based upon it.

Damon is software engineer (doing mostly Ruby and Rails work since 2005) for VitalSource Technologies. He also recently created a Twitter/Flickr mashup called SnapTweet and is the leader of the Austin On Rails user group.

The meeting will be held at Datran Media @ 7th & Brazos - meet at the elevators. Socialization practice to follow.