Report: Montreal On Rails, 3rd Edition (2)
October 4th, 2007 · by Heri · entrepreneurship
Last tuesday, the third edition of Montreal On Rails was planned at the Standoutjobs offices. It’s a monthly event, organized by Carl Mercier and Mat Balez from Karabunga where a couple of ruby on rails developers give a presentation about the framework, be it plugins, tools, helpers etc. It’s also a macbook pro party, even though I don’t think the organizers planned that.
crazy wide-lens photography by Alain Pilon
This month’s edition had 3 speakers:
- Gary Haran began with a presentation about prototype and front-end javascript programming. I am not an expert in DOM scripting, and the only thing I can say is that I discovered lots of functions. For instance, Prototype can manipulate DOM classes and divs, change CSS styles of elements with code size downsized most of the time to a 4 lines or so, compared to the 100s if you had to do it by yourself. It also integrates well with Rails and json. Overall, I really liked Gary’s presentation. Reminds me of my brother who always says Javascript is the language of the future
- Francois Beausoleil presented the Piston package, a handy utility that allows developers to manage plugins and code they get from third-parties aka vendors. Now, you can stop worrying about future changes, repository avalaibility or code udpates from your vendor. Francois Beausoleil said that it allows him for instance to have his own bug-free, modified version of Rails, which doesn’t stop him to merge his version with the official versions. Piston uses svn
- James Gollick presented 2 plugins he used and loved. The first one was make_resourceful, a flexible and powerful tool which allows RoR developers to save a lot of keystrokes. The second was shoulda, which will give a set of standard unit tests for your models. I thought this was a great presentation, one that made me look yesterday at each of the plugins
Me with Marc-Andre Cournoyer, and Mat Balez and Camillo from Karabunga
Overall, this was a great presentation, although I fumbled initially at the closed doors. But that’s only me, I guess I should learn to arrive on time on next editions :-)
More reports:
Will you someday present at MoR? I know you’re a Rails hackers too! Come on!
Leave a Reply