Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 9 June
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

HotCocoa is a thin Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. It simplifies the verbose OS X API so that you can programmatically construct user interfaces without Interface Builder.

MacRuby and HotCocoa

MacRuby is an implementation of the Ruby language that runs on the Objective-C runtime under OS X. MacRuby is based on Ruby 1.9 but contains substantial modifications including the merging of object models (every Object is an NSObject), using the Objective-C 2.0 generational garbage collector, moving core types (String, Fixnum, Array, Hash) atop their Objective-C counterparts and replacement of standard libraries to more optimally integrate with OS X. MacRuby also includes a new library, HotCocoa. HotCocoa is a thin, idiomatic Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks.

Cocoa classes have extremely verbose method and constant names. A substantial amount of code is written to just instantiate and configure instances of these classes. Interface Builder is used by most developers because it hides the complexity of manually configuring controls, but at the expense have having to use a GUI builder and the obscuring those configuration options inside the IB user interface. One of HotCocoa’s chief goals is to allow Interface Builder simplicity, but in Ruby code. Buttons, Sliders, Windows, WebViews—the whole works—HotCocoa simplifies this process by creating a mapping layer over the top of Objective-C classes. HotCocoa adds Ruby-friendly methods, constants and delegation techniques that look refreshingly simple, but do not prevent full use of the Cocoa APIs.

This talk with introduce MacRuby and HotCocoa and show demonstrations on how to use them to quickly build OS X desktop applications with Ruby.

Presenter Bio

Richard Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software and services company InfoEther, Inc and is a board member of Ruby Central. Rich’s background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing. Rich has been using Ruby in production systems since 2002 and has contributed to many Ruby projects over the years including RubyGems and starting RubyForge. Rich’s current Ruby efforts are focused on simplifying OS X development with HotCocoa and is a contributor to the MacRuby project.

Side Note

This will also be the first co-meeting with the local CocoaHeads group. Should be an exciting time.

Summary

Lasting only 30 minutes I believe it was the shortest meeting ever. Next year I promise to schedule either a speaker or panel of speakers to recap RailsConf.

Attendance

I happy to say we had three new members for May’s meeting. I’m not happy to say it was 60% of the total attendance. :-D

Additional Information

• RailsConf 2009
• More RailsConf on Twitter

Next Meeting

HotCocoa and MacRuby!!! Tell everybody! I’m totally psyched that we have Rich Kilmer, from InfoEther, coming into town to school us on some HotCocoa. This is also going to be a joint meeting with Richmond’s CocoaHeads Group. I’m expecting a packed house for the June meeting.

Announcements

JetBrains Winners

• Michael Berdichevsky : RubyMine License
• Will O’Donovan : RubyMine License

Area Conferences

• Developer Day in DC on 30 May
• Ruby Nation 2009 on 12 and 13 June

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 12 May
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

The annual RailsConf ReCap wherein we learn about the latest and greatest.

Social in the Making

There is a strong chance this meeting will turn into a Social. I take full responsibility for not properly planning this meeting. I did not schedule a speaker, opting instead, to rely on members attending the conference to come and present their findings. So if you know someone attending RailsConf encourage them to join us and to give us their impressions of the conference.

However, it just might be time for a social anyways. Thankfully we’ve had 7 consecutive months of speakers. And the rest of the year is shaping up nicely too; I’ll be posting the schedule in the next few days.

Presenter Bio

<Your Name Here> or Your friend’s name ;-)

I’m happy to announce, starting with our May meeting, the CVREG will be giving away 2 licenses to some JetBrains products.

Each month, our speaker and one member can choose their prize:

• RubyMine Personal License,
• ReSharper Personal License,
• dotTrace Personal License,
• IntelliJ IDEA Personal License,
• TeamCity Build Agent (for our Continuous Integration and Build Server)

Overall, JetBrains is working with more than 350 groups globally, and have already given away more than 2000 licenses of ReSharper and IntelliJ IDEA!

I’ll be getting the ‘fine print’ (i.e. how soon a person will receive their license? is there a limit as to how many licenses a person can win? stuff like that…)

So at the start of each meeting if you want to be considered for a license give me your name, email address and desired license. At the end of the meeting I will announce the winner.

Remember, Spread the word and bring a Friend!

P.S. Notice the new logo in the Sponsor’s section? :-D

Summary

I believe this meeting will go down as one of the strangest meetings in CVREG history. Ben arrived early and as people started coming in it was noted the projector was missing. Oh No! While the projector was getting retrieved I did my best to entertain, but I failed miserably. Thankfully Ben and a few of the Viget Labs crew was on hand to talk about Developer Day and RubyNation.

I must say someone did ask what happened to my hair (my ponytail, actually) and if I was going to grow it out again. Ummm…no comment and maybe ;-)

But the real excitement was Ben’s presentation. Ben devised a way to drastically reduce time to display using a combination of page caching, AJAX and Rails Metal. I believe someone Ben trademark it. :-)

If you were in attendance please consider rating Ben’s presentation on SpeakerRate. I’ve included the link in the Additional Information section.

Attendance

We had 15 people at this month’s meeting. The third double-digit attendance. You guys Rock! We even had three brand new faces in attendance. Very encouraging. Please, keep spreading the word.

I would also encourage you to make suggestions on how we can serve your Ruby needs. Remember we have the mailing list and the IRC channel in which to post your questions and suggestions.

Additional Information

• SpeakerRate

Next Meeting

Stay Tuned for details on May’s Meeting. I don’t have a speaker booked for May because of RailsConf. So, if you or someone you know is attending RailsConf stop by and give us your impressions. If nothing else we can all go to the pub for a pint or two. ;-)

Announcements

beCamp 2009 is happening again. If you’re not familiar if a BarCamp-style two-day conference held in Charlottesville, VA. This year is being held on 8 and 9 May. It looked like several people from the group will be attending. I encourage you to carpool. There will be a one-night hotel stay.

Developer Day is a one-day, developer-centric conference in DC. And did I mention it’s only Fifty Bucks (USD$50) [there is an additional $1.25 Fee when registering]? It’s being held on 30 May, that’s a Saturday if you don’t have a calendar handy. The website has additional information, like speakers, agenda, and a map!

Also, RubyNation 2009 is once again being held in Washington DC on 12-13 June. Registration is still open and be sure to use the discount code NovaRUGFan to get $20.00 off.

Last but definitely not least I want to say something about tonight’s sponsor: Viget Labs. They were kind enough to pay for this month’s dinner.

From the website: http://www.barcamp.org/beCamp2009

beCamp May 8th-9th 2009 @ CitySpace, Charlottesville, VA (on Downtown Mall)

If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. beCamp is Charlottesville’s version of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon—organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. Realizing that the most energizing parts of any tech conference are the ad hoc conversations that take place in the hallways between the sessions, beCamp facilitates these types of interactions for an entire event.

...

This is the 3rd year this event is being hosted. I have gone to the two previous conferences and was blown away by the enthusiasm shown by all participants. This year there is a 100 person cap on attendance (as of 3 April, 57 have signed up). I encourage you to visit the beCamp2009 page and sign up.

—Mel

Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday, 14 April
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Place: Strategy Cafe
Details: Upcoming Event

We would greatly appreciate it if you could go to the Upcoming Event and indicate your intention to attend this meeting.

Meeting Abstract

Over the past year, Rails has gradually (and sometimes quietly) introduced some dramatic new changes. The most obvious of these is the Merb merger, but one of the most important steps on the path to Rails 3.0 was the introduction of Rack support. The effects of that change are wide-ranging, and are often surprising — and include the possibility for new architectures that were impractical or impossible before. Specifically, it is now feasible to build a complex Rails application that can still respond extremely quickly and directly to a specific set of requests, such as those an AJAX service might experience.

Page Caching for your Rails App

In this session, we’ll explore in depth how this strategy reinvigorates a useful, but formerly limited, capability of Rails: page caching. Of the three caching methods built into Rails, page caching is by far the most efficient, but it is also the least flexible. By making use of the Rack support in Rails (with tools like Rails Metal and simple Rack applications), page caching will come into its own as a viable strategy.

Presenter Bio

Ben Scofield is a development director at Viget Labs, where he builds Rails applications for Web 2.0 startups. He’s been using Ruby and Rails for over four years, and is the author of Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects, from Apress. He’s spoken at Railsconf, Rubyconf, Railsconf Europe, and more over the past few years. When he’s not hacking, he spends time with his wife and daughter, reads voraciously, and tries to make the world a better place for web developers everywhere.

RubyNation Early Registration is Open!

RubyNation’s conference organizers are proud to announce that RubyNation, the DC area’s Ruby and Rails developers community conference, is back, bigger and better! This year’s RubyNation will be held June 12-13 in Reston, Virginia.

Early registration is available by clicking here (early pricing is available until April 5th): http://rubynation.eventbrite.com/ or from the web site: http://rubynation.org

This year’s RubyNation conference will feature many luminaries in the Ruby and Rails community, including presentations from Chad Fowler, Hal Fulton, Yehuda Katz, Russ Olsen, David A. Black, and Bruce Tate. Our list of proposal submissions looks awesome, too. We will be publishing the complete list of speakers and a schedule very soon. We have already selected the full list of speakers and are in the process of confirming them, so it won’t be long before we announce them. We will have at least 18 speakers this year, and two lightning talk sessions.

The location will be great, too, the Hyatt Regency Reston. The Hyatt is a first class conference center, with great food, and excellent facilities. It is located in the Reston Town Center, which is full of cool restaurants, bars, and shops, all within a few blocks of the hotel. RubyNation will also be accessible by public transportation via a direct bus link to the West Falls Church metro station to within a few steps of the hotel.

We have worked hard to keep the RubyNation conference affordable and yet improve its quality and accessibility significantly. We hope you’ll agree and join us for RubyNation 2009!

Additional Information

Provided by Keith Bennett

Unlike last year’s venue, this one is easily accessible by public transportation. The 505 bus goes from the West Falls Church station to Reston Town Center. The schedule is at: http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/connector/pdf/Rt_505_556web.pdf