NHRuby.org June meeting summary.

[Scott Garman]

Many thanks to those who attended the June meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails
User Group on Tuesday. We had a total of six attendees, but this was one
of the most engaged audiences yet. There was about as much group
discussion as there was presentation time, and by 9:30 we had to wrap
things up.

Our new meeting location at RMC Research is beautiful, to say the least.
As you walk through the main doors and up the stairs, you pass by a
museum-like arrangement of African masks, which are the collection of
RMC Research's owner. The inside of the building has a very open and
tasteful architecture, including the conference room, which has antique
furniture along its walls. This room can easily hold 20-30 people, and
the 62" plasma display is a great alternative to using an LCD projector.

Anyway, before I start sounding like a real estate agent, let's get on
to the meeting content. Scott Garman's overview and demonstration of
using the TabNav Rails plugin showed one of the many ways Rails can
abstract time consuming forms of HTML and CSS coding into simpler
methods for getting things done. Some notes from this presentation can
be found on our wiki:

http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/TabNav_Plugin

Nick Plante gave a great presentation on how to contribute to Rails open
source software projects. His overview included a discussion of the
political issues of getting a patch accepted as well as the mechanics of
generating a patch and submitting it to the project. PDF slides of his
presentation can be downloaded from:

http://www.nhruby.org/downloads/contributing_to_OSS_projects_nick_plante_jun07.pdf

Scott Garman then gave a short overview of some of the best screencasts
for Ruby on Rails developers. These links are great resources for
newcomers to Rails as well as experienced developers. They are
summarized on our wiki at:

http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/Ruby_and_Rails_Resources#Screencast_Tutorials

By this point we were running short on time, and Nick Plante gave a five
minute overview of his planned presentation on using Macromedia Flash
with Rails applications. Nick will be giving this complete presentation
during a future meeting.

Once again, I'd like to offer sincere thanks to Tim Golden of RMC
Research for helping make this new meeting location possible. We will be
returning to our third Tuesday of the month schedule for our July
meeting on 7/17.

JULY MEETING: Live Rails Coding Session

And what will our next meeting be on? We're going to do something really
fun. Nick Plante and Scott Garman will be offering to code up a live
application (or at least as much as we can during the meeting time) of
*your choosing*. That's right - join our discussion mailing list and
throw out a (reasonably simple) web application idea, and group members
will vote on which one to start coding during the July meeting! We hope
this will be a great way to teach the processes and philosophy of doing
agile web development with Ruby on Rails.

You can join our discussion list at:

http://mail.nhruby.org/mailman/listinfo/nhruby-discuss

Regards,

Scott

-- 
Scott Garman
sgarman at zenlinux dot com