Notes from last week's NH Ruby/Rails meeting

[Ted Roche]

The New Hampshire Ruby / Rails group <http://nhruby.org> met as usual at 
the RMC Research offices in Portsmouth. Thirteen people attended the 
meeting, a suspicious number of them from Maine. We started, as we often 
do, with a round of introductions.

Josh Nichols <http://technicalpickles.com/> presented RubyGems and You. 
A former Java developer, started working with Ruby about two years ago, 
got a “real” Ruby job about 6 months ago, laid off 2 months ago, 
currently “employment independent.” Josh presented an excellent overview 
of how gems work, how they fit into the logic of Rails apps, how they 
are distinguished from plugins, and how gems can be created. He went on 
to talk about the two primary repositories, RubyForge 
<http://rubyforge.org> and GitHub <http://github.com/>, and talked about 
the benifits and liabilities of each. This was all pretty much 
background for his presentation of Jeweler 
<http://technicalpickles.github.com/jeweler/>, a set of scripts that can 
generate the framework needed to build a gem, with support for pushing 
it directly up onto GitHub, automating the bumping of version numbers 
(patch, minor and major versions). Josh made a very clear presentation 
of the skeletal files that were created and touched on issues with RSpec 
testing, rake scripts, how to tie in library paths, vendor-izing your 
gems. Whew! A great amount of material covered quickly and well. Thanks, 
Josh!

Brian Turnbull <http://brianturnbull.com/> did a presentation on the new 
features of Rails 2.3: Engines, nested transactions, nested forms, 
nested attributes, dynamic and default scope, other changes (multiple 
conditions for callbacks, HTTP digest authentication, lazy loaded 
sessions, localized views, and more!)

Brian then did a short presentation on Rails Metal 
<http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/12/17/introducing-rails-metal>. 
Metal runs on top of Rack, and is a tool you turn to when the full Rails 
stack is too complex or too slow. There was some interesting discussion 
on how Metal can fit into the calling stack, short-circuiting calls that 
didn’t need the full Rails process.

Demo version: http://github.com/bturnbull/bturnbull-metal-demo

You can view their slides via SlideShare and also view a WebEx video of 
the event (see the post’s comments) at 
http://nhruby.org/2009/2/20/ruby-gems-jeweler-and-a-rails-2-3-preview

Thanks to Josh for the trip up from Boston and the great presentation. 
Thanks to Brian for two cool presentations. Thanks to Tim Golden and our 
hosts at RMC Research for the great facilities and for broadcasting the 
presentation via WebEx this month. Thanks to Nick for herding the cats 
and ordering the pizza and making the announcements and giving away a 
couple of cool O’Reilly books. Thanks to all for attending and 
participating!

Next month: Ted Roche presents an introduction to Cascading Style 
Sheets, Nick Plante presents Sinatra. Hope to see you there!