Sean Mountcastle

Back in July I attended the Advanced Ruby Studio in Reston, VA. At the time I had wanted to blog about it but my life suddenly became extremely busy and I left my blog to languish for several months. To rectify that, I’ve decided to write up this post providing an overview of the studio and my impressions.

The instructors for the three day course were Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, two elite Ruby programmers (and excellent teachers). While I wouldn’t consider every topic covered during the course advanced, I will say that there was a good mix of intermediate and advanced content (and some of the advanced stuff was really advanced!)

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This past Wednesday we held the July Northern VA Ruby Users Group. We started off with two short talks, first by Patrick Reagan on two mocking libraries for Ruby (Flexmock and Mocha), the second was on Haml and Sass by Devin Mullins. For the final hour of the meeting, Matt Scilipoti spoke about using Rails with legacy databases.
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Based on a comment from an alert reader, I found out that the link was broken in my Ajax Spy in Rails post. Since I couldn’t locate the original zip file on my powerbook, I rewrote it from scratch using Rails 1.2.3 with REST/CRUD and then updated the link at the end of that post.

To save you time, you can download the source from here as well.

This (and the prior) version simply uses a timer to periodically call back to the server to see if there were any updates, which places an unnecessarily heavy load on your server. A better approach would be to use something like Juggernaut to push updates out to clients. I’m investigating Juggernaut now for use in my Ajax Rails game — I’ll post more once I have a demo.

Tonight we held the April meeting of the Northern VA RUG. Ray Daly presented RSS and novel uses for it while Paul Stadig discussed various methods of screen scraping.

Ray provided an overview of RSS, examples of widespread usage (news feeds, monitoring, podcasts, etc) and then spoke about how RSS could be used to tie together disparate systems. He wrapped up with a Rails demo showing how to create RSS feeds and a brief discussion of the available libraries for creating and consuming RSS/Atom.

Paul’s presentation on screen scraping started with a discussion of why you’d want to gather data in this way (most of the interesting data lies in the ‘deep web’ where there is no API/RSS to extract the data easily). He then gave an overview, with example code, of N tecniques: POOR (Plain Old Open-URI and RegExps), POOH (Plain Old Open-URI and Hpricot),WWW::Mechanize, scRUBYt, WATIR and FireWatir, and scrAPI.  Of the examples shown, Hpricot looks like an excellent HTML parser (though it does require native code) while scRUBYt and scrAPI seem to have the most promise for making screen scraping easy to do. His slides are here.

The May NoVA RUG will be held on May 23 as the prior week is RailsConf.

Tonight we had the March meeting of the Northern VA Ruby Users Group. First up was Douglas Sellers who talked about Selenium and Selenium on Rails. After a short break, I spoke about RESTful Rails (focusing on CRUD, REST and ActiveResource).

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This month we had Chad Fowler as a guest speaker at NoVA RUG. His talk was entitled “Quick and Clean Rails Development.” Here’s the abstract for his talk:

Rails is all about speed. It has been said that Rails programmers can develop software ten times faster than those programming in technologies such as .NET or J2EE. Rails itself is evolving at the speed of light.

But, to paraphrase Martin Fowler’s RailsConf 2006 keynote, with Rails we don’t have to choose between Quick and Dirty and Slow and Clean. With Ruby, and therefore Rails, we can have both speed and maintainability.

With Rails, the speed comes naturally. As it turns out, the cleanliness often doesn’t. This talk will focus on how to make your application development both quick _and_ clean.

Read on for a summary of Chad’s talk.

Update: I found a video of this talk which Chad gave at Rails eXchange in London here.
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