It’s that time again. Join us Tuesday July 8. We’ll be meeting at the Strategy Cafe offices (there’s a map at upcoming) and headed over to the Triple for libations, conversations, and pool.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by matt.overstreet, Mon Jul 07 11:52:00 UTC 2008
It’s that time again. Join us Tuesday July 8. We’ll be meeting at the Strategy Cafe offices (there’s a map at upcoming) and headed over to the Triple for libations, conversations, and pool.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by jvanfleet, Thu Sep 06 19:39:00 UTC 2007
Eric Pugh from OpenSource Connections will be demoing anything he can think of, including the incredible awesomeness that is Lego Mindstorm and how he’s working with it from Ruby.
Sign up on upcoming if you plan on attending!
Posted by jvanfleet, Thu Jun 28 12:37:00 UTC 2007
Ben Scofield from Viget Labs will be giving his talk from RailsConf at our usual place and time. Ben works with Patrick, who has been kind enough to attend several of our meetings and put us in touch.
Here’s the upcoming link, please let us know how much pizza we’ll need.
Posted by jvanfleet, Sat May 19 11:21:00 UTC 2007
The June meeting has been announced for the second Tuesday of June. Jon Maddox and I will be giving our spiel about our experience at RailsConf. Now I’ve got to go, so that I can continue to have that experience.
Posted by jvanfleet, Mon May 14 13:48:00 UTC 2007
First, thanks to Stu of Relevance for taking time out of his schedule to visit us in Richmond. We all appreciate it very much.
As he revealed at the Curry House after the meeting was over, Stu has been working with Venkat Subramaniam recently on training materials, and the two of them come from different schools of thought concerning slideshow presentations. After Stu’s recent JavaOne experience, he decided to use as few slides as possible during his presentation.
Having already read (and reviewed) Stu’s book, I was very interested to see his application of many of the important concepts in the book in his opening section. He began with an AppFuse piece of Struts controller code, and refactored it into Ruby on Rails code one step at a time.
Introducing each of these concepts in turn, he turned more than a dozen lines of Java code and reduced it to three equivalent lines of Rails code. See for yourself at the Relevance blog.
The next segment of our talk was an introduction to JRuby. We were given examples of inventive language options that a programmer has when working with JRuby. I noted some of the ones I found most interesting:
java.io.File becomes JIO::File)We were also given some examples of working with JRuby at the jirb command line. Although noting that there was no single project that Relevance has that worked 100% with JRuby out of the box, he did say that the number of failures is very low, and on Java 5 the errors do not appear. JRuby is obviously very close to being ready for prime-time.
Stu said that he had recently been reintroduced to the status of Groovy and Grails, but it was clear that he really liked what he had seen. I feel quite certain he would recommend Graham’s book on the subject if any readers are interested in a Java solution.
When comparing applications written in one of the dynamically typed alternatives available on the JVM with standard, AppFuse-style code, he offered a phrase rhyming with “your smock will be beaned.” You’ve been warned. Avoid smock beaning!
UPDATE: Added link to Stu’s dynamic typing and readability post.