Archive | Ruby

New Hampshire Ruby, 16-Oct-2007: Rails Deployment

Organizer Scott Garman posts:

This month’s NHRuby.org meeting topic will be on deploying Ruby on Rails applications. While back in May our meeting focus was on using Capistrano as our primary deployment tool, this month Scott Garman will be demonstrating a simpler application to manage Rails deployments, called “Vlad the Deployer

Vlad the Deployer “targets the 80% use case” of deployments and boasts an engine written in less than 500 lines of code. Is simpler always better? Drop by our meeting and find out!

Scott will also be discussing various Rails-related tidbits he’s been working with recently.

Anyone who attends the meeting will be offered special coupon codes from Linode if they’re interested. The coupons give you two months of free service after purchasing one month of their Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. Linode sponsored the recent Rails Rumble and Nick Plante
had many good things to say about them.

WHEN: Tuesday, October 16, 2007. 7-9 PM.
WHERE: RMC Research Offices, 1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH.

For a map and driving directions, see our wiki site

Notes from the NH Ruby/Rails Group, 25-Sept-2007: Scott Garman and Nick Plante

Five attendees made it to the September meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails User Group, held as usual at the well-appointed RMC Research offices, though not on the usual third Tuesday. A round of introductions lead to some vigorous discussions, including how to broadcast and record meetings (perhaps a future meeting will be available via WebEx?), other computing organizations and conferences in the Granite State (GNHLUG, SwANH, the infoeXchange conference, NH High-Tech Council, etc.).

Nick Plante had some great stories about the Ruby Rampage, a 48-hour online programming contest he help run. A large number of teams competed and a fair number actually delivered working applications, some of them looking quite polished. There’s open voting on the most popular applications, and winners will walk away with a number of desirable prizes. Nick’s also been tapped to do the closing presentation at Ruby East, where he will demonstrate some of the more popular applications. There are some great apps there, and some will be providing their source code, though not all. Check them out!

On to the main presentation: Scott and Nick had started a simple Ruby app for NHRuby members to be able to suggest future meeting topics and vote on them, giving the organizers some ideas on what to present next. Tonight, Scott presented the unit, functional and integration test frameworks built into Rails and/or available as add-ons. Nick showed the UI for the voting interface and dove deep into how the form functioned. There was a lot of discussion, with debates on where the boundaries are in unit vs. functional vs. integration, and how Javascript (via the Prototype libraries) can be integrated into the interface and how Rails allows graceful degradation on platforms with Javascript unavailable or disabled. Comparisons were made between the internal, programmer-centric tests provided by Rails and external tests a QA person might run with a tool like Selenium. Lots and lots of great ideas. In a future meeting, Scott and Nick will discuss the next step, deploying the application, perhaps using Vlad the Deployer (ow) and/or the new Capistrano 2.

Thanks to Scott for organizing the meeting, Tim of RMC for providing the meeting space, Scott and Nick for the presentation, Brian for mentioning Selenium and all for their attendance and participation!

New Hampshire Ruby/Rails Group, 25-Sept-2007: Live Coding

Organizer Scott Garmin posts:

“Tomorrow’s NH Ruby/Rails User Group meeting will include a continuation of the live coding project Nick Plante and Scott Garman started during the July meeting. This project was to develop a web application where group members could submit proposed topics for future meetings, and vote on their favorites… This month, Nick Plante will demonstrate how to add the voting system to the application. Nick will use an AJAX-based 5-star voting system that you may have seen on many product review sites… Scott Garman will give an introduction to the Rails testing framework, demonstrating how unit, functional, and integration tests are written. Scott will also demo some useful third-party tools that make testing easier and faster, and how they integrate with the NetBeans IDE.”

WHEN: Tuesday, September 25, 2007. 7-9 PM.
WHERE: RMC Research Offices, 1000 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH.

For a map and driving directions, see our wiki site.

CentraLUG: 1-Oct-2007: Michael Kazin shows Nagios

The Central NH Linux User Group returns to the Library after a summer hiatus at the Sybase offices in Concord. The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, room 146, at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on October 1st at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

At this meeting, Michael Kazin will be presenting Nagios, the Open Source monitoring service. From http://www.nagios.org, “Nagios® is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” Written in Perl and controlled by text configuration files, Nagios offers the ability to alert administrators to a huge number of possible problems with connectivity, speed, or performance. Nagios offers a web interface for close-to-real-time monitoring, email/pager alerts, the ability to launch other programs, etc.”

Michael is a computer consultant at a well-known consultancy working for well-known companies in the military-industrial complex. He is a member of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group’s Board of Directors. Previously, Michael helped run the Rutgers University Student Linux User Group and gained his experience with Nagios by monitoring hundreds of machines in the Rutgers Data Center.

Future Meetings: Currently, we have a couple interesting meetings coming up: November: Ted Roche on Cascading Style Sheets, December: David Berube on Ruby, January: Bruce Dawson on low-power Linux computers. As always, meetings are subject to change. You are encouraged to join the low-traffic announcement list to get announcement and cancellation information.

DLSLUG, 2 August: Usable Web Applications with Rails and AJAX

Bill McGonigle announces the August meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual at Dartmouth College, Carson Hall, Room L01 from 7 – 9 PM. The main presentation will be “Usable Web Applications with Rails and AJAX,” presented by William Henderson-Frost.

“Will will present Greenout!, a new web application that’s focused on usability and developed on the Ruby on Rails platform using AJAX techniques, the Prototype library, and plenty of custom code. He’ll describe the process of developing a web application with Ruby on Rails, the challenges of writing an AJAX application, and some of the tips and techniques he’s developed along the way.”

“Will is a Senior at Dartmouth College, majoring in Computer Science, and a Hanover native. He enjoys good programming languages, like Ruby.”

Sounds like an interesting meeting. Ruby is a pretty sleek language, and the Rails platform makes application development far easier.

IT Conversations audiocasts I’m listening to this week.

While on the road to a client yesterday, I got to listen to a couple of audiocasts, as the mountainous terrain around here makes radio reception difficult. As I’ve blogged before, a five cent CD-R seems cheaper than the batteries to try to jury-rig an MP3 player to a FM transmitter to tune in on the car radio. Insert disc. Play. Very simple. On this trip, I listened to:

Joichi Ito: The Future of Blogging. “The Internet is truly becoming an open network with the rise of amateur content and open source software. In this talk, Joi Ito takes us through the growth of the internet as an open network in layers to the point where the killer app is now user generated content. Earlier, it was the little guys around the edges of the internet who created the open standards which made the web work, and today it is those same people who fuel it with their creativity. Joi also shares with us his observations of the remix culture seen on the net. [Accelerating Change audio from IT Conversations]” — quite the blast of conversation. The key point: user content, rather than mainstream media, is the next big internet wave. Great moment: Joichi points out that “amateur” comes from Latin roots of “from the heart” and doesn’t say anything about the quality.

Saul Klein, VP Marketing, Skype: “Skype has become one of the prominent disruptive technologies of the early 21st century. Allowing anyone with a broadband connection to make cheap calls all over the world and free voice, text (and now, video) calls to anyone on the Skype network, it has changed the way many people think of the telephone. Skype has influenced pricing and availability, and is so ubiquitous that it is lending its name to become the verb for using PC-based voice over IP… In this interview, Larry Magid talks with Saul Klein, VP Marketing of Skype. They discuss the changing nature of the telecom business, Skype’s new video feature and the potential for Skype to bring telephony to previously under-served markets.”

David Heinemeier Hansson, Developer, Ruby on Rails: Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails, “Ruby on Rails has received a lot of buzz among the web developer community, but many wonder exactly what the fuss is all about. In this high order bit from the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, developer David Heinemeier Hansson explains the secrets behind the success of Ruby on Rails.”

All audiocasts came from the IT Conversations: All Programs feed. Worth checking out, and considering supporting IT Conversations if they bring as much value to you as they do to me.

CentraLUG meeting, March 7th: Webrick, LinuxWorld wrap-up

David Berube, our fearless leader, posts: Monday, March 7th – Webrick and Linux World. CentraLUG is having another great meeting on Monday March 7th, and this time, we’ll be covering Webrick, a powerful system for easily creating custom webservers in Ruby. With Webrick, it’s easy to drop a full webserver into any application. We’ll also have a brief recap of LinuxWorld. Per usual, there will be copius amounts of free caffeine.

It’s at the NHTI. You can get directions on the NHTI site: http://www.nhti.net/frames_Map.html. It’s in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on that map. The room is 146, and it starts at 7:00.

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