Ch-ch-ch-changes

After a 2-year history of meeting at Frog Design (thanks!), we've got new digs for Austin On Rails! We will be meeting a few blocks over at Datran Media at 7th and Brazos. The meeting room is actually on the 8th floor of the business tower of the Omni Hotel building. The elevator requires a keycard, so we will have to shuttle folks up as they arrive. For this reason, I am going to suggest that people show up at 6:30PM and meet at the elevators just inside the building at the corner of 7th and Brazos. This will give us adequate time to get upstairs and get set up for the meeting. The meeting will run from 7-9PM as per usual. I'd like to thank Josh Baer of Datran Media for offering up a conference room for Austin on Rails.

Ruby and Rails Support in NetBeans IDE 6.0

The NetBeans IDE was originally created as a tool for Java developers. For quite a while now, however, it has had support for other programming languages. In version 6.0, the NetBeans IDE added support for yet another language: Ruby and its framework Ruby on Rails. The features include a powerful editor, refactorings, hints and quick fixes, a gem manager, an interactive shell, a full-featured debugger, and more. This presentation includes numerous demos that illustrate the productivity boost you can get by using NetBeans IDE 6.0 as your development environment for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications.

Gregg Sporar has been a software developer for over twenty years, working on projects ranging from control software for a burglar alarm to 3D graphical user interfaces. His interests include user interfaces, development tools, and performance profiling. He works for Sun Microsystems as a Technology Evangelist on the NetBeans project.

What's New in Ruby 1.9?

Released just this last Christmas, Ruby 1.9 is considered a "transitional" version towards 2.0 and includes several major and many minor changes to the language. This talk aims to get you up to speed on some new language features and the syntactic changes present in 1.9, with a quick overview of modifications to the standard library and notable performance improvements.

A Ruby developer since 2001, Bruce Williams has been pleased to see his favorite language rise out of obscurity the last few years -- and pay the bills in the process. A developer for FiveRuns, Bruce also does a bit of independent consulting, has contributed to or served as the technical editor for a number of Ruby and Rails books, speaks at conferences when inspiration strikes, and is an aimless open source hacker and language designer in his copious free time.

In lieu of our December meeting, we are going to celebrate our 2nd Anniversary as a group by having a holiday party. Yes, it's become an annual tradition by now...and a darn fine one at that.

We are going to meet at Buffalo Billiards on 6th Street (map) on Tuesday, December 11th from 6 to 9 PM. We currently don't have any official party sponsorship this year, so we are going to just meet up and grab some pool tables and hang out downtown at Buffalo. Should be fun!

Last year, we donated about 95 pounds of food to the CAFB (Capital Area Food Bank) and I think it would be great if we could do it again. So please, bring some non-perishable food items with you to Buffalo. I'll gather them all and then drop them off at the center. Thanks so much!

Looking forward to hanging out with you all (!) next week and shooting some pool while partaking in the beverage of your choice. :)

P.S. I'm looking for a few volunteers who are willing to meet me down there at 5:30 so we can grab up a couple of tables together. Please send me an email if you can help do this.

Performance Tuning Your Rails App

Writing Rails applications is easy, writing fast rails applications can be trickier. We will take a look at how to diagnose and solve some common performance issues with Ruby on Rails applications. We will focus on optimizing a typical Rails application at three levels: the Rails framework, ActiveRecord and MySQL. We will also discuss some tools available to help you find and fix issues at these three levels.

Rob Mack has been developing Java and Ruby on Rails web applications professionally for about 3 years and is currently working as a Rails developer for VitalSource Technologies.

RESTful Rails Web Services for the Rails World

A common-sense guide to creating and consuming RESTful resources in the Rails world. Understand the Resource Oriented Architecture and how you can make your application a first-class citizen in the programmable web.

Rein Henrichs is a Software Engineer at Facilities Technology Group. He has been designing for the web for 5 years and working with Ruby and Rails for over two years. He contributes to various open source projects, including Merb, DataMapper, and Eskort. He is passionate about web standards, creating joyful user interfaces, and the programmable web.

Socialization practice to follow at Hickory Street.

Looking forward to see you there!

P.S.

I'm thinking we should get together for the holidays again at Dave & Busters? We could throw back a few beverages and play some games. What do you think?

Howdy Folks

This month we're going to have a product demonstration of ActionItem, a social tasking application developed by a local Rails startup. Mark Roberts and Guy Howe will be delivering the presentation.

Mr. Roberts, president of ActCentric Corporation, is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of progressive management, sales, and technical experience in information technology, with a special focus on open systems enterprise storage. Guy Howe is a primary developer on ActionItem, which is implemented in Ruby on Rails.

ActionItem.com is a new web service under development that is designed for agile group collaboration. ActionItem.com is intended to replace using email and spreadsheets for managing tasks, while having a much lower barrier to adoption than formal project management tools. The service can support any type of project that involves 2 or more people for 2 or more days. Their primary focus is the area of 'ad-hoc collaboration' in which teams quickly form and collaborate on tasks such as planning, events, document writing and review, and other tasks relevant to high-value knowledge workers.

We're also excited to have Mike Perham from FiveRuns give us a demo of JRuby and Glassfish.

Mike is a Software Engineer at FiveRuns. He's also a member of the Apache project and has been developing open source software since 1995. He loves racing motorcycles and learning new technologies, especially anything that makes building web-based applications easier.

JRuby/Glassfish provides an alternative to Mongrel and Nginx, and allows you to mix Ruby and Java like peanut butter and chocolate.

Our meeting will be held at Frog Design at 8th and Congress.

Beverages and socialization practice to follow the meeting at Hickory Street.

Looking forward to seeing everyone out there!

Scheduling Note

We will be meeting at our typical location for our monthly meetings (Frog Design at 8th and Congress). We will run the meeting roughly from 7PM-9PM, so please be on time. Also, please note that our September meeting is on Monday (directly after Lone Star conference is over). This meeting date was chosen to accommodate our visitor from Amazon's tight schedule.

Rails EC2 Plugin

Steve Odom revisits his ElasticRails plugin that makes it simple to deploy your Rails app to Amazon EC2.

Steve's hobby is creating rails applications that no one visits. Sites like smarkets.net, trivionomy.com, and quizical.net. He's also created a couple of rails plugins; s3cache and elasticrails. One day he hopes to create something popular so he can quit his dayjob. He can be reached at steve.odom at gmail.com

AWS + ROR = Development Bliss

Amazon spent ten years and over $2 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched eleven services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 265,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

In this session, Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon web services, is going to provide an overview of some of the Amazon Web services and demo some cool apps that are built using Ruby on Rails. Additionally, We will see a demo of how a typical Rails application can built to “Auto-scale” that simply “listens” to incoming requests/second and makes a smart “educated guess” of how many more steady-state servers are needed to serve the increased load and actually automatically spawn that many virtualised instances, without any human intervention.

This session will highlight some of the newly launched features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and newly launched Amazon Flexible Payment Service (Amazon FPS) and show how you can monetize your existing services.

As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, Jinesh Varia helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way businesses compete. He is focused on furthering awareness of web services and often helps developers on 1:1 basis in implementing their own ideas using Amazon’s innovative services. Jinesh has over 7 years experience in XML and Web services and has worked with standard working groups in XBRL. Prior to joining Amazon as an evangelist, he held several positions in UBmatrix including Solutions Architect, Enterprise Team Lead and Software engineer, working on various XBRL-based financial services projects including ASP.NET based Call Modernization Project at FDIC. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh’s publications have been published in ACM and IEEE. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Penn State University. He plays tennis and loves to trek.

Socialization Practice

Drinks and what not to follow at Hickory Street. Don't miss it!