Boston Ruby Group

New Location!!, Sermo

This month’s meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 13th at Sermo, 215 First Ave, Cambridge. About two blocks from the old location at the CIC. The meeting runs from 7 to 9pm, but you can arrive after 6:30. Directions

This meeting is sponsored by Viximo

Agenda

• Mark Bates will be presenting the Mack Framework. Mack is a Ruby web framework being designed for distributed, portal-like applications, using ‘best of breed’ technologies and form, with an emphasis on performance.
• Daniel Higginbotham will be presenting a tool he developed, Palmist, that is used to optimize MySQL databases on Rails sites. Check it out at svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/logviewer
• Jonathan Barket will be presenting restful-authorization, an authorization and workflow mechanism built on top of restful_authentication.

Many Thanks to:

• Viximo for sponsoring the meeting.
• Sermo for providing the venue and all the food and drinks.
• EngineYard for providing a host for group projects.
• Brian Delacey and John Norman for helping out,( producing the videos, finding speakers, ...)

Unfortunately, the meeting featuring, on Monday 4/28, Ezra has been canceled.

Ezra got stuck at JFK in NYC and is not able to make the meeting.

He sends his apologies.

This meeting will be held at it’s usual place, the Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway St, Kendall Sq on Monday April 28th (you can get in as early as 6:30 PM; socializing and pizza starts at 7:00 PM).

It will be held on the 5th floor. Sign in and go to 5. Then follow the signs.

Oh, check out the new group site put together by the hackfest. Signup and see whos coming.

Agenda for Monday Night:

• O’Reilly book giveaway with Brian Delacey
• Ezra Zygmuntowicz author of Deploying Rails Applications and creator of Merb will be speaking.
• Brief intros and anouncements

This meeting will be sponsored by Second Rotation

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Many Thanks to

• Ezra Z. for speaking.
• EngineYard for providing a host for the group site and projects.
• Second Rotation for sponsoring the mtg and picking up the tab for pizza.
• Brian Delacey for producing the videos
• O’Reilly for donating books.
• Jeremy Durham for finding the speaker.
• John G. Norman for finding the venue.
• Dan Croak , Josh Nichols and Tom Shealy for putting the new group site together.
• Cambridge Innovation Center for providing the room.

This month’s meeting will be held at it’s usual place, the Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway St, Kendall Sq on Tuesday, April 8th, and on Monday April 28th (you can get in as early as 6:30 PM; socializing and pizza starts at 7:00 PM).

It will be held on the 5th floor (not the 14th). Sign in and go to 5. Then follow the signs.

Directions .

We are looking for a Sponsor for the April 8th mtg.

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Agenda for Tuesday 4/8

• Antony Nigel Donovan – acts_as_materialized_path.
  A plugin to assist in handling of hierarchical data. A different take on functionality similar to, without claim to be better than, BetterNestedSet.
  • Writing the plugin.
  • Using the plugin and RESTful rails to manage a hierarchy.
  • Fun with AJAX and REST.
  • Databases and hierarchies.
• Lightning talks and general discussions.

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We are having a special meeting on Monday 4/28.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz author of Deploying Rails Applications and creator of Merb will be speaking.

This meeting will be sponsored by Second Rotation

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Many Thanks to

• Antony and Ezra for speaking.
• EngineYard for providing host for group projects and site.
• Second Rotation for sponsoring the Ezra meeting and picking up the tab for pizza.
• Brian Delacey for producing the videos
• John G. Norman finding the speakers and finding a venue.
• Cambridge Innovation Center for providing the room.

This month’s meeting will be at usual place, the Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway St, Kendall Sq on Tuesday, March 11th, (you can get in as early as 6:30 PM; socializing and pizza starts at 7:00 PM).

It will be held on the 5th floor (not the 14th). Sign in and go to 5. Then follow the signs.

Directions .

This meeting is sponsored by The Morph Application Platform For Ruby on Rails see below for more info.

Student Presentations from John Norman’s Harvard Extension Ruby on Rails course:

• Darryl Lundy – aslratings.com , A chess-style ratings system for players of the board game ‘Advanced Squad Leader’; feel free to register yourself so you can have a look around.
• Andrew Drane and Jesse Colman-McGill – Cook’s Compass – “Find your way in the world of food, locally available ingredients, food markets and recipes”: This is a port from ASP to RoR. The original ASP is at www.cookscompass.com and the new site is at www.chefscompass.com
• Tracey Zellman – Online Personal Medical Information. A service to let individuals conveniently and securely make available the important medical information for themselves and their families.
• Louise Rains – www.stash-n-share.com The fabric exchange place for quilters.
• Steve Morss – webXconnect – an Internet web site for interconnecting electronic devices.
• John Norman will report on teaching a semester-long Ruby and Ruby on Rails course.

The Morph Application Platform For Ruby on Rails . Morph Labs has developed the next generation elastic Ruby on Rails deployment, delivery and management system. Automated deployment, version management, 7/24 monitoring, load balancing, routing, database instances, continuous backups, elastic sizing and high availability are just a few of the features of the managed service application platform. Using GRID computing resources from Amazon EC2 and S3 this new generation Web 2.0 system helps developers to quickly bring applications to life and take away the complexities of configuring hardware and software. Developers can now focus their time on innovation instead of administration. Take the Morph Application for a spin at www.morphexchange.com

Morph Free Signup. This is a closed beta but members can get access by contacting Manuel Espino at espinojm@gmail.com.

Many Thanks to:

• Morph Labs for sponsoring the meeting. Buying the pizza and drinks
• EngineYard for providing a host for group projects.
• Brian Delacey for producing the videos
• John G. Norman finding the speakers and presenting.
• Cambridge Innovation Center for providing the room.

We’re moving back to the Kendall Square location for the January meeting. We’ll meet at the Cambridge Innovation Center, 14th floor, 1 Broadway St, Kendall Square on Tuesday, Jan 8th, from 7 to 9pm. Directions .

Here’s the drill for getting to 1 Broadway, 14th floor:

Enter from Broadway, not earlier than 6:30 PM, ideally by 7 PM; sign in; go to 14; ring doorbell; call if issues.

Speakers/Agenda:

• Victor Mazurenk and Dmitry Amelchenko from RootLocus, Inc will be present the Clean Together Project. To create, as a community, a web site that will let people report their contribution into the worldwide effort of cleaning up the environment.
• Topher Cyll author of Practical Ruby Projects. Topher will be doing a presentation about one the projects in his recently published book.
• Open to other topics, lightning talks, ...

Many Thanks to:

• RootLocus, Inc for sponsoring the meeting, buying the pizza and drinks.
• Eric Richmond and Brian Delacey for producing the videos
• John G. Norman for finding the venue and helping to find the speakers.
• Cambridge Innovation Center for providing the room.
• Victor, Dmitry and Topher for speaking.

The November meeting will be at the Harvard law library, Langdell South classroom, on Tuesday Nov 13th from 7-9pm. This meeting is sponsored by Geezeo

Directions

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Agenda:
• Intro and Announcements
• Robert Thau – “Building a DSL for access control policies”
• Tammer Saleh – “Shoulda – Making tests easy on the fingers and eyes.”
• Theron Parlin – “Geezeo and Amazon Web Services”

Also, some of us will be hanging out after the meeting at a place to be determined.

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Thanks to:
• Geezeo for sponsorship.
• Eric Richmond and Brian Delacey for producing the videos

The meeting room is provided by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

The October meeting will be at the Harvard law library, Langdell South classroom, on Tuesday Oct 9th from 7-9pm. Directions

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This meeting is sponsored by Second Rotation

Agenda:
• 7:00 – 7:15 Intro and Sponsor
• 7:15 – 8:00 Luke Crawford: Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot
• 8:00 – 8:15 Break
• 8:15 – 9:00 Tammer Saleh: Shoulda – Making tests easy on the fingers and eyes.

Also, some of us will be hanging out after the meeting at a place to be determined.

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Wanted to thank:
• Second Rotation for sponsoring the meeting.
• Robert Thau, John R. Norman and Brian Delacey for helping out with the last minute changes.
• Eric Richmond and Brian Delacey for producing the videos

The meeting room is provided by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

The September meeting will be at the Harvard law library, Langdell South classroom, on Tuesday Sept 11th from 7-9pm. Directions

• John Norman will be demonstrating the use of JRuby to embed IRB-style functionality into a slideshow delivered with HTML Slidy
• Jeremy Durham will talk about using JQuery with Rails.
• Open to lightning talks.

Next Month Ezra Zygmuntowicz author of Deploying Rails Applications and creator of Merb will be speaking!

The meeting room is provided by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

The August meeting will be at the Harvard law library, Langdell South classroom, on Tuesday August 14th from 7-9pm. Directions

Ruby Clinic

John Norman and others had the idea of putting together this clinic. As John says, “Bring in existing code, break up into groups of, say, 1 needy developer and two kibbitzers, and then refactor. It could be good as a code review for more experienced or expert Rubyists.”

• Lightning talks (7-7:30)
• Clinic (7:30 – 8:30)
• Results and wrapup (8:30 – 9:00)

Clinic Projects
• Chris Maxwell is looking for help with his Rails site is a basic Rails site
• ....

The meeting room is provided by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

The meeting is sponsored by Brontes Technologies.