So, SXSW Interactive is over and it was good.

Particularly, I heard that the Austin on Rails SXSW Happy Hour sponsored by OtherInbox and FiveRuns was good. In years past, we’ve skipped the March meeting because we used to do mid-month meetings and it always coincided with the festival. Now that we’ve adjusted to Fourth Tuesday, we will be having our regular meeting this month. Wow, seeing you guys two times in one month! Remember, you can always come out to Cafe Bedouins to work on your projects on Tuesdays at Thunderbird if you would like as well.

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UPDATE: Location: DATRAN MEDIA in the Omni Hotel Bldg. (7th & Brazos) - 8th floor - either meet by elevators or if they are unlocked, head on up!

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.

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We’ll be meeting again at Datran Media at 7th & Brazos in the Omni Hotel building. We’ll gather by the elevators and shuttle up to the meeting room as we did in January. Please try to arrive by 6:30 so we can get everyone upstairs and start the meeting on time. The meeting will run from 7-9PM with socialization practice afterwards. This month, we’ll be exploring a couple of supporting technologies to Rails, the PostgreSQL relational database and git, a distributed revision control system.

Guyren Howe will be presenting a talk called PostgreSQL Instead, in which he will discuss why he considers Postgres to be a much better database than MySQL. MySQL is a prominently used Rails database so it will be interesting to hear about the benefits of Postgres.

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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.

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