Meeting Notes, Ruby SIG, 15-April-2008

[Ted Roche]

Eight people attended the April meeting of the Ruby Special Interest 
Group, http://www.nhruby.org, held as usual on the second Tuesday of the 
month in the meeting room at RMC Research.

We lead the night off with a brief video on Passenger [1] from 
Phusion.nl, a new Apache module that host rails, like a mod_rails (not 
_ruby) module. Nick reported he's been running it on one of his sites 
for a while and is pleased with the performance and the marked decrease 
in load. Having a mod_rails option available is likely to get hosting 
companies offering fractional horsepower shared virtual machines to be 
able to host Rails apps, bringing Rails onto the $7-a-month commodity 
hosting sites. Cool!

I asked for recommendations on the right way of parsing incoming XML and 
SOAP packets and was referred to Hpricot [2] and soap4r [3]. Another 
attendee asked for recommendations on Content Management Systems. Nick 
mentioned Radiant (which we got to see later in the presentation). 
comatose [5] and railfrog [6]. We got into a couple discussions during 
the evening on the stability and applicability of Ruby and Rails for 
many situations, citing high traffic web sites and the several runtime 
engines/VMs like JRuby in which Ruby code can run. As usual, some of the 
fun moments of chatting with a knowledgeable group like this can be the 
side conversations on which laptop to buy, which OS to run (we saw OS X, 
Ubuntu and Fedora at the meeting, Macs outnumbered PCs).

Finally, we arrived a the Live Hacking session where we got to watch 
Scott and then Nick show how to add new functionality to an existing 
app. Actually getting to see another craftsman at work brings out all 
sorts of good questions. Scott added chronic [7] to his To-Do 
application. Chronic is a "natural language datetime parser,"  according 
to the web site, and Scott showed how it could easily be integrated into 
an existing app, and accept values like "Next Tuesday" or "Thursday last 
week" and return sane datetime values. We also looked at what would be 
involved and set up a unit test to check our changes.

Nick showed us a little more of the Radiant application, and his work on 
making the Radiant CMS support multiple sites. The source he's working 
on is stored at github.com, and the networking graph [7] is a thing to 
behold. Nick spent a little time getting us familiar with the different 
philosophy of git (branching is inexpensive, merging is very smart, 
branches can interact in many ways including pushing to and pulling from 
each other) and then grabbed the most recent code and hopped right into 
to refactor a code snippet that was an inelegant hack using a deprecated 
technique into one that was more proper, running our unit tests before 
and after to confirm the refactoring didn't break anything.

An excellent evening as usual! Thanks to all for their attendance and 
participation, to Scott and Nick for organizing, announcing and 
presenting, and to RMC Research for providing the nice facilities.

[1] http://www.modrails.com/
[2] http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/
[3] http://dev.ctor.org/soap4r
[4] http://radiantcms.org/
[5] http://comatose.rubyforge.org/
[6] http://railfrog.com/
[7] http://chronic.rubyforge.org/
[8] http://github.com/seancribbs/radiant/network

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com