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.

Yes, we are having a meeting this month! I apologize for my tardiness in posting this note.

This month we’re going to go into the finer points of creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get an overview of CouchDB, a “distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API”, implemented in Erlang. Here’s a technical overview if you want to read up on it.

Welcome to 2009!

We’ve got an interesting mix to kick off the year. We’ll go deep into creating Rails forms with a screencast from Pragmatic called “Forms Essentials”. They’ve been gracious enough to give us permission to show the episode to our group. It’s a part of their Mastering Rails Forms series. We are also going to get a high-level overview of Django and how it compares with Rails.

Episode 1: Form Essentials (30 minutes)

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.

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.

Here are the links for the slides:

Rob Mack's Performance Tuning Your Rails App

Rein Henrichs' REST and Rails: Web Services for the Rails World

Performance Tuning Your Rails App

Writing Rails applications is easy, writing fast rails applications can be trickier. We will take a look at how to diagnose and solve some common performance issues with Ruby on Rails applications. We will focus on optimizing a typical Rails application at three levels: the Rails framework, ActiveRecord and MySQL. We will also discuss some tools available to help you find and fix issues at these three levels.

Rob Mack has been developing Java and Ruby on Rails web applications professionally for about 3 years and is currently working as a Rails developer for VitalSource Technologies.