RubyDC

Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist, Amazon Web Services, (http://aws.amazon.com) will discuss 'Web-Scale Computing' . These web services enable business to build an elastic architecture that responds quickly to demand.

The field of services that Amazon.com offers continues to grow and can be broken down into infrastructure tools or web services. Many business, nonprofits and government entities are using these services to lower costs, and expand services while meeting sudden demands for messaging, backups, storage.

Entrepreneurs are finding niche markets utilizing these services. We all know how successful Amazon has been at the online shopping experience. Looks like they are leading again in Web Services. I wouldn't miss this one if you are looking for low cost, incremental solutions to growing your business, or helping out your employer. Oh yea, you can do it with Ruby.

Jeff's presentation will focus on:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3--pay-per-use storage ),
• Amazon's Simple Queue Service, and
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2--on-demand computing),

and will include real-world demonstrations and examples of how these services are being used singly and in combination. As time permits, Jeff will also show how to write code using one or more of the services.

Second Life, 37 Signals and other not-so-large businesses use Amazon's services to reduce hosting costs and maximize scalability.

This just in, an infoburst from Amazon: "Amazon.com spent 12 years and over $2 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Today, Amazon Web Services exposes this technology, through 10 open APIs, allowing developers to build applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon's business."

Event will occur 7 June 2007, 7-9:30pm. Location will be at George Washington University, Blue/Orange GWU Metro stop:

Thursday, 7 June 2007, 7-9:30pm
The George Washington University
Media and Public Affairs Building
Room B02
805 21st Street NW
Washington, DC
http://www.gwu.edu/~map/hmap/index.cfm?bldg=103

Parking is limited, here are some garages nearby:

• http://www.ecolonial.com/location.pl?location=76
• http://www.ecolonial.com/location.pl?location=180

This event is cohosted with the DC Rails User Group--big thanks to Chris S on helping with this location. No wifi is readily available.

Please RSVP to ken dot rubo at gmail.com so we can let you in the door.

OVERVIEW

AMRUG Minutes Sunday 6/25/2006 3pm Java House. Attendees were Brian, Andrew, Vince, Jeff, Pius, Matthew, Ken. A few new members showed up this time, and discussion was less centered on one or two members. No guest speaker this time around.

SUMMARY

RailsDay2006 and RailsConf2006 transpired before this meeting and were touched upon briefly by members. Jeff gives a good summary of his Rails "Workshop for Good". Keeping up with Ruby developments, or learning tools pops up as a topic and as a result there is some talk about which books are better.

DISCUSSION

• Ken asks for help installing fxruby via a gem install. Some suggestions are to try file://, try fresh install, try gemserver:8088 check. Later Vince offers some help, deleting older directory entries in the gemspace. Ken eventually just uninstalls and reinstalls an earlier version to get the dependencies to work properly.
• Brian C. talks about RailsDay2006. Brian C. said he got 50% done. Ken mentions that some of the announced projects after completion of the contest period were a wedding planner website. [Later, as of July 5, it seems the SVN dumps are available and as of 29 July there are no new announcements about winners. -Ken]
• Question whether Drag and Drop Scriptaculous is really necessary?
• Ken mentions that there are switches for SVN commands in Rails. Brian C says he will check out Subversion comments.

Subversion and Rails Tips Reprinted here from 12 March 2006

1. What are the alternatives to Subversion?Zed Shaw is working on a Linux-only version, but there have been no updates in a few months.
2. Is there subversion on Windows? Yes, and it's best to use the separately developed Tortoise client which works from right click menu.
3. Note that Rails generator scripts can now take option --svn or --c which automatically adds files to svn.
4. Understand the increasing importance of using /lib/tasks folder, put a rakefile in there to quickly create your repository for new apps.
5. As Rails enthusiasts we could use some tests to be sure Subversion is setup properly.

   Easy backups of your repository to a third location may stave off disaster:
   svnadmin dump /home/user/svn | gzip -9 > FireProofPlace/svndump.gz

   Restore it with:
   gunzip -c FireProofPlace/svndump.gz | svnadmin load /home/user/svn

---

• Jeff relates his thoughts about organizing his Workshop for Good. Publicity moved slowly at first. On May 20 opened registration. By April 7, about 1-month out, one workshop teacher blogged and several others blogged. And then instantaneously, there were 25 people on the waiting list. Then the schedule changed a bit. Jeff says he had good soloists on the team. By May 18 still planning for the May 20-21 event. Physical setup took much longer than expected. 2 teachers of the three had an organic lesson plan while Jeff was opting for a concrete plan. One teacher did an Intro to Rails which may have been a bit long. Some attendees had 5 commercial Rails projects in play already. The first day was challenging. Another teacher, an expert in Ruby, saved the day. Out of many participants, one guy said it was boring. So Jeff moved the Rails topics to more advanced topics, and then about 6-8 people had trouble keeping up. On the second day they broke into 3 groups: Server Advanced Development / Visual Styling / Beginners. Jeff took beginners group, and the other two teachers took the other groups. The advanced group discussed SVN internals, load balancing Mongrel. Workshop gave out free stuff. Adapted Path submitted a $2k conference ticket to Rails Playground. O'Reilly sent stacks of books. People stayed afterwords. It was fun and hard. The Goal was to raise funds for the school and they reached almost 90% of their goal. Next time Jeff may raise the admission to $450. As a result of running this first workshop, Jeff received a project management offer for running a workshop at another location.
• Jeff talked about using Network for Good which is a Paypal-like service that charges 2-8% transaction cost fee. Payments through the school were handled by the school's CFO which simplified the payment process. The plan for the funds is to purchase equipment such as Smart Boards, Qwizdom learning equipment, 2 more overheads, and get small lab additions for the charter high school.
• Matthew asks about learning resources, and mentions a bit about his workplace, Council for Institutional Investors. Jeff shows off some books that he brought and touts the book he uses to teach programming, LEARN TO PROGRAM. Ken says that there is a great need for coders in the DC nonprofit world, especially in regards to fundraising.
• Talk turned to books and CSS again: Wrox Professionals has site built based book which Jeff says is inspirational for CSS Stuff. http://www.wrox.com/ Wrox often has free sample chapters as PDF immediately available online. Friends of Ed CSS Books, Check website They list sites of the week. http://www.friendsofed.com/ CSS ZEN GARDEN is a good resource. http://www.csszengarden.com/ NIFTY CORNERS via Brian C. Is this it, http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html ? LEARN TO PROGRAM the book via Jeff, is better than the online version. http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ PRACTICES OF AN AGILE DEVELOPER, http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/pad/
• Vince is moving his Rails app from testing to production.

RESOURCES

• http://script.aculo.us/ Scriptaculous--wiki, examples, of using Javscript and DHTML, Scriptaculous and Ruby
• http://Qwizdom.com calculator 802.15.4 RF International standard, Audience response systems, also sell response software to interact with Powerpoint for PCs and Mac. Was focused on K-12 schools, but now also focusing on corporate learning environments.
• http://alistapart.com/ A List Apart -- manhousrs dedicate? For people who make websites, fresh every Friday.
• http://www.cii.org/ Council for Institutional Investors Founded in 1985 in response to controversial takeover activities that threatened the financial interests of pension fund beneficiaries, the group began with 21 member funds. Today the Council has over 140 pension fund members whose assets exceed $3 trillion, and more than 130 educational sustainers. It is recognized as a significant voice for institutional shareholder interests. Annual dues are $1.30 per $1 million in fund assets, but no less than $3,000 and no more than $30,000.
• http://dabbledb.com/utr/ 7-min video, with verve and energy, that shows how to create database with Graphical User Interface (GUI).
• http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby. Instead of using FastCGI, SCGI Mongrel hosts Ruby web applications using plain HTTP.

Ilya Grigorik's (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) Faster Pagination in Rails explains that the Rails helper generates hundreds of classes for pages and windows for several links. Ilya suggests paginating_find for the database side and offers code as an extension or as help.

[From Carter's Blog]

I was recently provided with a PDF copy of Ruby on Rails – Up and Running by the Adams Morgan Ruby Users Group. As you can imagine, books on Ruby (and Rails) are about to flood the shelves as the publishing industry gets on the RoR bandwagon. I wanted to see how well a book could cover the fast-moving framework and in what ways it could improve my understanding of Rails.

The book is organized around creating a photo sharing web application step-by-step. Off the bat, I was puzzled to see “Installing Rails” as the last chapter in the book. Having a working runtime enhances the value of the book to the reader. On the flip side, I was pleased to see Mongrel mentioned as one of the web servers available for Rails development, a sign of the freshness of the content.

The authors develop the application from the ground up, tying general concepts (MVC, relational data, etc) into their Rails counterparts (ActiveRecord, etc). Explanations for certain design decisions (how ActiveRecord eschews mapping in favor of wrapping) are sprinkled through-out the book and provide an increasing sense of confidence in the framework.

Beyond the basic controllers, models and views, the authors provide details on enhancing their application with some judicious use of AJAX. They tie-up the development of the Photo Share application with an overview of the Rails testing framework, explaining the importance and ease of automated testing.

Overall, I give the book high marks. The book is excellent for anyone just getting into Rails development or looking for and end-to-end overview of the framework. The level of detail is limited, given the book’s 189 pages, so experienced developers may have less to gain. You will not read anything about RESTful Rails. It should also be noted that this book is focused on Rails, not Ruby, and contains little insight into the language.