May Meeting Recap

[Chuck]

The May KRUG meeting went well. To start things off we handed out
color copies of the Ruby Cheatsheet v.1 (http://ruby.cenophobie.com/
rubycheat.php)

Then we jumped into our GOPs tournament taken from Ruby Quiz (http://
www.rubyquiz.com/quiz116.html). Leslie wrote a round robin tournament
program right before the meeting. It's called harness.rb and is
uploaded along with the bots to this google group. After running the
tournament several times we examined the code of the bots to learn
about the implemented strategies.

We watched two Railscasts videos (http://railscasts.com/) and found
that they fit a Ruby meeting very well. The videos last about 4
minutes each and promote discussion afterwards.

We discussed several Ruby related issues:

Flex as a User Interface:
Flex and flash have the appeal of write once and run everywhere. This
sounds like a great time saver for those web applications that don't
need to allow bookmarks or search engines to crawl their content.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
http://www.openlaszlo.org/

REST and the Session:
There was a long discussion on the ways a web application can and
cannot keep track of a shopping cart using REST. Leslie provided the
following Dave Thomas blog link:
http://pragdave.pragprog.com/pragdave/2007/03/the_radar_archi.html

Abandoned Red Handed
A number of us have enjoyed Why The Lucky Stiff's code and blog
(http://redhanded.hobix.com/). This is in addition to his humorous
ruby guide (http://poignantguide.net/ruby/) and many projects (http://
code.whytheluckystiff.net/). Some sorrow was expressed about the
demise of Red Handed but his new adventure (http://hacketyhack.net/)
is duly appreciated.

Eager Loading
The Railscast regarding Eager Loading lead to a discussion about
caching and memcached (http://www.danga.com/memcached/) in particular.

A good time was had by all.

Chuck Fouts