Austin On Rails

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!

We are having an introductory Ruby and Rails workshop the night before the Lone Star Ruby Conference. Admission to the workshop is for you to make a donation to one or more of the charities we are supporting:

• Habitat for Humanity
• Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Muscular Dystrophy Association
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Ruby Central

We've already raised over $800 in the first week, which is wonderful, but we are far from our goal of $2500. We would greatly appreciate your support with these endeavors. The speaker list for the evening workshop (9/6, 6-10PM) is as follows:

• hal fulton - ruby overview
• james edward gray ii - blocks
• bret pettichord - testing in ruby
• marcel molina, jr - why i <3 ruby
• bruce tate - rails overview
• bruce williams - taming your views
• rick olson - active record for the masses
• robert rasmussen - 30 minutes rails live demo

We can't wait to get everyone together for this event.

Please join us! Thank you.

NOTE: Lone Star Ruby Conference pricing goes up after August 10th to $300. You can save $100 by registering this week!

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.

The Working With Rails site has been updated with a bunch of new features. One of them is a Groups feature, so I decided to create the Austin On Rails group today. Feel free to join if you are a regular attendee of Austin On Rails.