SF Ruby Meetup

I attended last nights San Francisco Ruby group meet up held at CNET. The theme of last nights meeting was Lightning Talks and Mini Hack Session. I was only able to attend for the Lighting Talks.

Rich Collins started off the lightning talks with a presentation of his new Ruby on Rails plugin Simply Presentable. In the meeting Rich said that Simply Presentable is an alternative to Simply Helpful, and view helpers in general. Simply Presentable introduces Presenter classes in your Rails projects, in addition to the already existing Model, View, and Controller classes. The Presenter class knows how to render the model, an active record instance, based on its state such as is it a new record or an existing record in the database.

I missed the name of the second lightning talk presenter but he talked about image generation with RMagick. Rmagick is a Ruby binding to ImageMagick. The presenter went through some sample code that created several images with text in them and filling the image with a gradient. The presenter said, “The same things you could do in Photoshop you can do with RMagick in a few lines of code.” He also said, “You want to be careful what you expose” when pressed about security concerns. Someone in the audience also mentioned ImageScience, as opposed to magic, as an alternative to ImageMagick.

Tim Burks’ lightning talk was a demo of RubyObjC, a new Ruby/Cocoa bridge he is working on. Tim stated that RubyObjC is rake/gem friendly. In fact in demoing a Cocoa application and manipulating it from Ruby he stated something to the effect, “No Apple tools where used in the making of this Cocoa app.” His demo app was really interesting because it was using ActiveRecord to insert and read data from a database and Cocoa on the UI front end. Can you imagine, a Cocoa on Rails framework?!?! Well, I did!

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