Folks, we've got a stunningly good meeting lineup this month. In fact, it's safe for you all to come back after you skipped my talk last time. ;-) I am sad to say that I actually won't be able to attend this month's meeting, as I'll be in the Bay Area at Velocity Conference. I am leaving the emcee duties in Josh Baer's capable hands. If you are wanting to keep up to date with Rails or performance tweak some existing apps, you *must* come out to the meeting this time.

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization by Eric Falcao

Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1? by Steven Smith

Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

ORM Deathmatch!

ActiveRecord isn't the only game in town when it comes time to access your database with Ruby. We'll take ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, put them in a steel cage match to the death and see who emerges victorious. Attendees in the first three rows might get bloody so bring a poncho.

Mike is a Ruby developer at FiveRuns and faints at the sight of blood.

Sinatra - a Tiny Ruby Web Framework

There are times when Rails seems like massive overkill, but you would still like to use Ruby goodness. This is especially true when your entire web site idea can be contained inside one file. We'll take a look at the features of Sinatra and play around with a sample application based upon it.

Damon is software engineer (doing mostly Ruby and Rails work since 2005) for VitalSource Technologies. He also recently created a Twitter/Flickr mashup called SnapTweet and is the leader of the Austin On Rails user group.

The meeting will be held at Datran Media @ 7th & Brazos - meet at the elevators. Socialization practice to follow.