ORM Deathmatch!

by Mike Perham

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

by Damon Clinkscales

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.

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?

Greetings Austin Railers!

This month, we're going to do a block of member mini-presentations again. I've received some feedback that the group is sometimes difficult to navigate for newbies because our typical talks often assume an existing understanding of many aspects of Rails. Naturally, it is difficult to please everyone. We need to strike some kind of balance. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to assume a basic understanding of Rails for our talks, and on the other I want to help encourage those who are just coming to Rails to get off on the right foot. I'd like our group to be a resource to both newbies and ninjas alike. It seems like a noble goal anyway. :)

So for part one of the evening, we are going to call it "If I Met A NEWB On The Street, What Would We Talk About?"

Lightning Talks:

• Creating a Rails Project in SVN and Setting Up Capistrano (Steve Odom)
• Controllers and Views: What's the Deal? (Edward Cruz)
• The Basics of Active Record (Mars Hall)
• Getting Started with Rails Migrations (Damon Clinkscales)
• Intro to irb and console (Damon Clinkscales)
• Rails Security Tip: CSRF & CSRFkiller (Tom Brown)

I am grateful to those of you who have stepped up and offered to present.

For the second slot of the evening, we are very fortunate to have Bret Pettichord, a testing expert who has recently returned to Austin, speak to us about Watir. Watir is written in Ruby and is one of the more popular Ruby libraries. It was actually written before Rails and was designed to be a general-purpose testing tool, suitable for web applications regardless of implementation technology.

Bret will be presenting a Watir demo that is based on the Depot Rails application developed in the Agile Rails book and describing how you can use Watir with Rails apps.

Bret Pettichord has been programming in Ruby since 2003. He is the lead developer of the Watir testing tool and the test architect at Dovetail. Since 2000, he has hosted the Austin Workshop on Test Automation . He is also co-author of Lessons Learned in Software Testing, a Jolt-award finalist.

We look forward to seeing you there. The meeting is at Frog Design and 8th and Congress. Beverages and What Not to follow at Hickory Street.