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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.
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The Joomla! installation comes with a neat module called Random Image. The Random Image module accepts an image directory path, and image type and will randomly and dynamically displays one of the images found in the image directory path for every visit.

But if you want to dynamically display images on you Joomla! site, I recommend you take a look at the AJAX Header Rotator module made available by JoomlaWorks. AJAX Header Rotator also requires a image directory path but instead of displaying a single random image, this module will load all the images and display one at a time. The AJAX Header Rotator rotates through images randomly or sequentially. Behind the scenes, AJAX Header Rotator uses jQuery to rotate through the image set.

A note of warning, I had to hack the AJAX Header Rotator module because I felt it lacked a few key parameters. For one, AJAX Header Rotator loads all the images in the image folder and I had felt there should be max number of files that it loads and rotates through on each user visit. I also added a parameter to enter the image alt text. And finally, the module code always displayed the same first image so I had to shuffle the images array to display a distinct image as the initial image.

Technorati Tags: joomla, cms, module, php, ajax, javascript, jquery, design, image rotator, rotator

It is that time of year where we reflect on the accomplishments of the passing year and look forward to the one to come. Here is a window of the past year in technology through past posts.

TechKnow Year in Review 2005

Ruby on Rails
Top 13 Ruby on Rails Presentations
Raising Model Errors in Rails
Scriptaculous Rails
Rails Model Validators
Acts As Taggable Tag Cloud
Top 11 Rails Plugins
Ruby Plugin Turorial
Ruby Mixins
Rails Single Table Inheritance
Ruby on Flex
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Carson Workshops is working hard on the two day conference The Future of Web Apps in London. The summit is going to be held in London during February 20-21, 2007. I had the opportunity to attend the San Francisco, September 13-14 2006 conference for which I present the following notes… The Future of Web apps conference notes are available as a single PDF document for your convinience.

Wednesday, September 13
Dick Hardt – The Emerging Age of Who
Kevin Rose – The Digg Story – Kevin talks about design and scalability.
Tom Coates – Social Change on the Web – Tom talks about users motivation.
Tantek Celik – Best Practice With Microformats – Microformats are fun.
Steve Olechowski – Ten Things You Didn’t Know About RSS
Carl Sjogreen – How We Built Google Calendar – Six key insights in building Google Calendar.
Mike Davidson – User-driven Content – Is it Working?
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Now that Java SE is released I wanted to cover one of my favorite feature, the Compiler API. I already wrote about a cool hack that can be done in previous versions of the JDK to compile Java code at runtime. I also wrote about compiling Groovy at runtime. Now I will cover how to compile Java code using the new Compiler API introduced in the JDK SE 6. Please not that the following code use classes that are currently only available with the JDK, not the JRE.

To get started you will need to instantiate a Java Compiler and Java File Manger.
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Groovy is an ‘agile dynamic language for the Java Platform.’ Groovy has many of the features available in Ruby such as closures and xml builders but draws much of its strength from Java’s extensive libraries.

Groovy can be embedded in your application to allow advance users or sales engineer compile and run Groovy scripts against a running system. Earlier I wrote about compiling Java code at runtime, but Groovy is a more natural solution for dynamically compiling and loading new classes. In this article I will demonstrate how to embed, compile, and load Groovy classes.

To get started you will need to use the groovy-all jar that is located under the embeddable directory of the groovy distribution. Add the groovy-all jar to your project.

You will need to create and set a CompilerConfiguration object accordingly, to indicate where to write out the class files and what additional classpath to use.
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