RUM August

Last night I went to my second Ruby Users of Minnesota meeting at the Loring Park Dunn Brothers.  Seems like a nice bunch.  Here’s what I learned about:

• There was a discussion about using Simply RESTful in rails applications.  This technique uses all the transaction methods of the HTTP protocol instead of passing every CRUD action through a POST or GET transaction, it attempts to use the correct transaction for the action, eg. Create => POST, Retrieve => GET, Update =>PUT, Delete => DELETE.  This is a good article: What’s New in Edge Rails: Simply RESTful Support – And How to Use It.  There was also something at Icon Buffet that was discussed, but I can’t seem to find it today.
• The Mac heads seem to be using Textmate as their development editor of choice, but I have a license for BBEdit and haven’t figured out all it can do, so I won’t be switching just yet.  Maybe when I get an Intel based Mac I can run Multi-Edit in a parallels virtual machine on the desktop.
• There was a demo for a system management software application where the presenter (sorry I forgot your name) said that he was running code blocks out of the database.  Yippee!  Just like what you could do with Clipper.
• Then in another presentation of an application for managing youth sports teams the discusstion turned to javascript and a Rails plugin for managing Unobtrusive Javascript called script.aculo.us

This should be quite enough to chew on as I continue working on the PickAxe book.