Orange County Ruby Users Group

We had a great meeting last night. We had about 18-20 people show up. We had trouble getting in the meeting room at first but it gave us all a chance to get to know each other in the hallway. Microsoft provided great facilities for us and we thank Woody and Gerald for his opening up the facilities to us and providing some books to raffle off.

We got about 1/3 through the “Create a blog” presentation but we got up and running and creating scaffolds to our DB very quickly and easily. Several people were following along, implementing the blog on their laptops at the same time I was. Maybe we’ll finish the preso at another time. We didn’t have time to go over the relational 1-to-many/aggregation support, validation, unit testing, server logging or AJAX support all found in Rails.

Jim Mack gave a great preso on meta programming and showed us the power of Ruby’s capabilities to modify and create code at runtime. I really liked the method_missing approach, very cool. Hopefully Jim can forward over URLs to some of the links he was showing us.

As for our next meeting we have some options. We can continue the “Blog in 15 minutes” intro to Rails, or one of our UCI ICS students (Matt I think was his name) thought it might be cool to have people present some of the ruby/rails projects they are currently working on. Someone else requested a Ruby Language Syntax 101 sort of presentation in order to help overcome the sometimes uncomfortable unfamiliarities with Ruby’s syntax.

All in all, there was a great spirit of “developers teaching developers” and everyone at all levels came out discovering something new. We had people from all kinds of backgrounds (Java, .NET, PHP, Python, C++, Delphi, etc) in attendance.

The next meeting of the OCRuby User’s Group will be held on May 25th at Microsoft’s Irvine Office (yes, I said Microsoft).

Microsoft OC About Page

Google Map

The meeting will start with networking at 6:30pm.

The first hour will walk through the “Create a weblog in 15 minutes” video. We encourage all to bring a laptop so we can all implement a weblog in > 15 minutes and feel comfortable with getting a simple Rails app up and running. If you bring a laptop you will need a few things pre-installed before the meeting:

1 – Ruby
2 – Ruby on Rails
3 – MySQL
4 – An IDE/text editor

This link has some great tips on how to get started.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/down

You may want to consider one of the “all in one” installations like InstantRails (Windows) or Locomotive (Mac OS X) if you’re not comfortable getting all of this running. When the walkthrough starts we will assume everybody’s laptop has all of this installed and set up. We don’t have time to walk through installation and management of these tools.

The “Create a weblog in 15 minutes” video can be found here:
http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

If you’re having trouble from pulling the video there is a ZIP-compressed version you can download from http://www.ocruby.org/15MinuteBlog.zip

If you don’t have a laptop available to you that’s OK, I’m sure other members won’t mind you pairing up with them.

The second hour will be a presentation on Metaprogramming in Ruby.

http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1895,1928561,00.asp

Agenda

6:30pm – 7:00pm – Networking, chit chat
7:00pm – 8:00pm – Walkthrough of “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” video
8:00pm – 9:00pm – Metaprogramming in Ruby