Here are the links for the slides:

Rob Mack's Performance Tuning Your Rails App

Rein Henrichs' REST and Rails: Web Services for the Rails World

Rock!

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!

We are having an introductory Ruby and Rails workshop the night before the Lone Star Ruby Conference. Admission to the workshop is for you to make a donation to one or more of the charities we are supporting:

• Habitat for Humanity
• Lance Armstrong Foundation
• Muscular Dystrophy Association
• Capital Area Food Bank
• Ruby Central

We've already raised over $800 in the first week, which is wonderful, but we are far from our goal of $2500. We would greatly appreciate your support with these endeavors. The speaker list for the evening workshop (9/6, 6-10PM) is as follows:

• hal fulton - ruby overview
• james edward gray ii - blocks
• bret pettichord - testing in ruby
• marcel molina, jr - why i <3 ruby
• bruce tate - rails overview
• bruce williams - taming your views
• rick olson - active record for the masses
• robert rasmussen - 30 minutes rails live demo

We can't wait to get everyone together for this event.

Please join us! Thank you.

NOTE: Lone Star Ruby Conference pricing goes up after August 10th to $300. You can save $100 by registering this week!