Notes from NH Ruby, 21-Oct-2008: Brian Turnbull, REST, Nick Plante, plugins

[Ted Roche]

Eight people attended the October meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails [0]
group, held as usual at RMC Research in Portsmouth on the third Tuesday
of the month.

The meeting started with a general chat session where a range of issues
were covered. Quite a discussion about computer industry trade books was
a notable item. A round of introductions followed, including several new
folks.

Brian Turnbull [a] had the first two presentations. REST, the
Representational State Transfer mechanism [2], is based on a PhD
dissertation [iii] by Roy Fielding, and describes a URI-naming technique
that "REST emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality
of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary
components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and
encapsulate legacy systems." Cool stuff, and essential to understand for
those developing modern web apps.

Brian also talked about the Atom Publishing Protocol [D], which
describes a scaleable way of managing and distributing documents using
RESTful interfaces.

Nick Plante [*] had the next presentation, on Demystifying Ruby Plugins.
Nick and Brian had spent the past several weeks putting together the
very successful RailsRumble [IV] -- which I hope they'll post some more
about soon - and so were a bit hard-pressed to have fully-baked
presentations ready for the SIG, so this presentation was more of an
open conversation on "what should we say about building plugins," a
perfectly acceptable topic for a user group meeting, btw, imo. (Nick
will be giving the full presentation at next week's "Voices That Matter"
[e] conference in Boston - good luck, Nick!) Nick talked about how
plugins differ from gems, the history of "add-ons" in general for Ruby
and Rails, and what design considerations went into building a plugin.
Then, we ran some basic code to show how a plugin would work. Excellent
overview!

Thanks to Scott and Tim for promoting and hosting the meeting, to Nick
and Brian for their presentations, and to all for attending and
participating.

[0] http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/Main_Page
[a] http://brianturnbull.com/
[2] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/NHRubyRest
[iii] http://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Efielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
[D] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/NHRubyApp
[*] http://blog.zerosum.org/about
[IV] http://www.railsrumble.com/
[e] http://www.voicesthatmatter.com/ruby2008/index.aspx

-- 

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