Notes from New Hampshire Ruby User Group, 25 June 2009: Pat Allen, Thinking Sphinx and Casey Rosenthal SASSiJS

[Ted Roche]

Twelve people attended the June meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / 
Rails User Group (nhruby.org), held on the 4th Thursday of the month ( 
we usually meet on the 3rd Thursday) at RMC Research in Portsmouth 
(Thanks to RMC and to John for hosting the meeting!)

Nick Plante was our master of ceremonies. As is the custom, we made a 
round of introductions to find out the most of the folks were "from away."

Pat Allen put on the first presentation, on Thinking Sphinx. Thinking 
Sphinx (http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/) is a Ruby library (not 
just for Rails) that allows Ruby applications to work with the Sphinx 
full-text search engine. Pat presented a slightly shortened version of 
the presentation he gave at RailsConf 
(http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/public/schedule/proceedings), and the 
presentation was clear, engaging and interesting. Participants had lots 
of questions to ask on search technology, word stemming, project status, 
what it's like to be a Freelancing God, what being the lead on a popular 
Open Source project is like, and more, and Pat's answers were 
insightful. Check out (pun intended) the source on github, the support 
on Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/group/thinking-sphinx) and 
Pat's guide to using Thinking Sphinx on Peepcode ( 
http://peepcode.com/products/thinking-sphinx-pdf)

Pat also took a moment out to plug his upcoming Rails Camp, a 
not-going-to-make-a-profit weekend get-together in BarCamp/Unconference 
format for 30-ish people at Bryant Pond, Maine. It sounds like a great 
event and a nice location and a price that can't be beat: $120 for 
3-nights, 3-days food, lodging and conference. Get details and consider 
signing up at http://railscamps.com/#ne_july_2009

Casey Rosenthal asked us, "What are style sheets for?" a number of times 
during his presentation, for good reason. Casey talked about SASS 
(http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html), a part of 
HAML (http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/) and his reimplementation of SASS 
in Javascript, SASSiJS, sounds like "sausages" leading to all kinds of 
predictable jokes. But the topic was thoughtful, intriguing, 
interesting, and controversial. SASSiJS actually allows a .sass file to 
be downloaded as part of the HTML file, with similar syntax to a 
stylesheet link, and a JavaScript file that interprets the .sass file 
into CSS and applies it to the HTML document. Discussion was far-ranging 
and insightful: "What's this good for?" "Would designers use this to 
make their CSS DRY?"  View the source on GitHub at 
http://github.com/clr/sassijs/tree/master.

Thanks to Pat and Casey for their great presentations, to Nick for 
organizing, and to John and RMC for the facilities.

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