SV RoR February Meetup
Recently I attended that February 2007 Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup at the offices of Insider Pages. At this month’s meeting, Scott Persinger gave a presentation of vod:pod and Matt Whittaker talked about his solo efforts with My Free Copyright.
According to Scott of vod:pod, vod:pod is another video space social network user generated content based web application. Think of vod;pod as a hyper-aggregation social recommendation site for video powered by good ol’ Rails and Ajax. Scott also informed those railers in attendance that a team of 2 software engineers went from conception to deployment in about 6 months. According to Scott, vod:pod uses the best Rails bits such as migrations, active record, plugins, Ajax + Prototype. Scott listed RJS, Hpricot + Mechanize, and IO.popen_timeout. As for Rails annoyances he lists the lack of better page component support, poor IDE debugging options, that classes never close, and poor library support.
As for the business model for vod:pod, Scott said that they could be running ads and they be making $3/month but at this point they don’t want to hamper the users experience. It seems that to the team at vod:pod they aren’t to concern about a business model until they start to scale up.
The second speaker of the night was Matt of My Free Copyright, a copyright registry for digital content. Matt’s talk just listed the ingredients for a typical Ruby on Rails web application. Matt recommended Acts as Authenticated as the first Rails plugin to get your app up and running. Matt also described some of the pros and cons of using the file, database, and memcache session manager. From what I gather, he recommends you start off with SQLSessionStore since memcache has “more moving parts.” Matt closed his discussion of with some background on BackgrounDRb (pun intended). Think of BackgrounDRb as a cron server that allows you to schedule tasks.
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