Where: Frog Design at 8th and Congress Ave

The presentation this month will be on using Prototype and Scriptaculous to take a Rails application that normally would have been handled with a lot of form posts, and convert it to Ajax using drag and drop and other Ajax options to make it perform better for users. It is an issue tracking system loosely based on Scrum. David will show how they built the application, and waded through the scattered Rails/Ajax documentation to come up with the Ajax pieces we have implemented.

In addition, David will show the work they've done with the Google Maps API and Ajax, where there was not Prototype/Scriptaculous support, and the existing gems only provided minimal functionality. He'll show how they hacked the Google Maps API rather than just use RJS and simplified commands. This will be a nice contrast on "rolling your own" Ajax handling versus using built-ins and why they ultimately decided to develop their own.

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