We had a small group last night but because of that it was a great opportunity to get hands-on help in an intimate setting!
Jim walked us through his presentation. We didn’t get through all of it, but we had some great questions along the way, including the difference of using “self.” instead of “@” when referencing attributes of Rails ActiveRecord classes inherited by your models (bottom line: use “self”).
Deb then gave a short overview of the MasterView project that she’s working on, which sounded like it has great potential for offering easy front-end development or rails templates for web designers without having to work around a bunch of <%= %> code injections and also for strong IDE/WYSIWYG support. There is a cool demo video of the tool at
http://masterview.org/videos/masterview_quick_start.html
And with more good news, Gerald Walsh, our sponsor at Microsoft, expressed interest and availability of allowing us to have our meetings there through the end of the year! Thanks Gerald for availaing your MSFT resources to us! For future meetings we’ll try to bring a WiFi router that we can plug into the 1 internet connection in the room so the audience can have WiFi internet access during the meeting.
This Thursday we will have our monthly OC Ruby meeting. This will be for us poor saps who couldn’t go to RailsConf 
Schedule
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6:30-7:00pm – Networking
7:00-8:15pm – Jim Mack, Rails User Login, Captcha and Validation Tricks
8:20-9:00pm – Deb Lewis, Overview of MasterView Rails Template Engine
Presentation Details
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Jim Mack – Rails User Login, Captcha and Validation Tricks
Bring your laptops and a functioning install of RoR if possible. We will work through how to get a rails project with a user login system going, manually working through the global validation using a filter in application.rb , adding “captcha,” having a special validation on one controller, and possibly able to show record based validation/access as well.
Deb Lewis – Overview of MasterView Rails Template Engine
MasterView is a rails-optimized (x)html friendly template engine plugin that provides another option to the existing rails view templates (rhtml and rxml). The main idea is to provide a template engine that would provide all the power of layouts, partials, and rails helpers but still be editable/styleable in a WYSIWYG editor. It was also a major goal that the syntax of these attribute directives be very similar to rails helpers so that one could intuitively start using MasterView with little learning curve other than knowing rails. MasterView was inspired by Amrita, Kwartz, Tapestry, Zope/PHP TAL, Liquid, and Web Objects but designed with a fresh approach and specifically targetted for rails users.
Meeting is at Microsoft, Irvine. 3 Park Plaza, 18th Floor, Irvine. See you there.
