Omaha Rails

Andy Peters has been using Rails for close to three years now. He started using it during his tenure at Sojern. He's since journeyed off and has now created his own venture, Ninth Division LLC where he specializes in the creation of iPhone applications.

iPhone applications have been all the rage lately but one forgotten facet is the development of enhanced Safari based web applications. Utilizing Rails, Andy will take you through the process of building a web application from the ground up stopping to showcase all of Rails's features that make creating web applications easy and quick. Alongside the demo of the framework, he'll show how easy it is to customize your views so that you can tailor your presentation for individual devices. Some plugins will also be discussed.

If you've been curious about Rails and would like to see an app created from start till finish this is the session to attend.

Does Jamis Buck need an introduction? Jamis has been a well-known advocate in the Rails community. He's made contributions to the Rails core and is the primary developer of Capistrano, the premier deployment tool for Rails applications. He works for 37signals and develops side by side with David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried to create Basecamp and other 37signals products. Basecamp alone has over two million account holders, tracking over 1.3 millions projects and 13 million to-do items.

We're going to have a 45 minute Q&A session live videocast (via iChat) where you can ask Jamis anything ranging from Rails specifics to programmer productivity to company culture at 37signals. This is not a meeting to be missed!

The inaugural meeting for the Omaha Rails User Group will be held on August 20th, 7pm.

We'll kick off the meeting by having everyone introduce themselves by giving a bit of your development background and a brief discussion of any Rails projects that you're currently working on.

After the introductions have been said, we'll discuss possible topics for future meetings and gather volunteers to do presentations. Here are some topic ideas :

• Merb (when is it a useful alternative?)
• Performance benchmarking
• RESTful concepts
• Behavior driven development with rSpec
• Deployment with Capistrano
• Scaling Solutions (Memcache, data sharding with DataFabric)
• New features in 2.1 (named_scope, etc)

Lastly, I will do a presentation on ActiveResource. Think "ActiveRecord for web services". If you follow the RESTful conventions that Rails sets up, you will see how easy it is to expose a service for other 3rd party sites to consume.

Meetings will be held at the AIM Institute's training lab at 412 S. 19th Street. Wireless access available.

I will be attending Barcamp Omaha on August 15-17th, so if you plan on attending please say hello.

I look forward to meeting everyone!

Jim Jones