Montreal On Rails - 2nd Event
The second edition of Montreal on Rails organized by Mat Balez and Carl Mercier of Karabunga at McGill had three presentations this time around.
1. Chris Scott - Ext on Rails
Chris is a Ruby on Rails developer and he presented Ext, a JavaScript framework for building client-side windows and widgets. More precisely, Chris showed how to integrate Ext within a Ruby on Rails project.
Ext is a project started by Jack Slocum. Initially developed as an extension to Yahoo’s YUI library, Ext has grown into a full-fledged framework which can target different Javascript libraries through ‘adapters’:
The widgets demonstrated were impressive for client-side display and data-manipulation. Grids have automatically sortable headers and also editable cells. Chris also showed drag-and-drop functionality for columns and trees.
Chris mentioned how it is interesting to transfer data back and forth between Ruby on Rails and Ext through Arrays and JSON respectively. Since JSON can be processed by the JavaScript engine natively with the eval() procedure, this makes sense.
The documentation for Ext is extensive and very well formatted.
It seems that some people misunderstood the benefits of using Ext although Chris did explain in the opening minute that it targeted several JavaScript libraries.
First, Gary asked about the preference of Ext over Prototype. Well, you can target Prototype with Ext, and, in fact, refactor your project or parts of it to target other libraries too.
Secondly, Heri, on a comment on Ext on Rails about Ext as an alternative to other client-side technologies for Rich Internet Applications, like Adobe’s AIR. This observation is incorrect since a recent example of Adobe AIR by Adobe themselves targets Ext. It’s perhaps here a misunderstanding of both Ext and Adobe AIR technologies.
Chris obviously knows his way around Ext and Ruby on Rails. It was a very interesting presentation and Ext is very promising and will soon be released as version 2.0.
2. Chris Lamothe - Rails authentication
The second Chris for the evening presented the acts_as_authenticated plugin for Rails. Chris demonstrated the plugin on a Youtube look-alike Rails projects, Footube.
He showed how to remove administrative links from some pages of the application through the plugin and a simple command:
script/generate authenticated user account
With this, the fields id, login, email, crypted_password, salt, created_at, updated_at are automatically generated in the database.
From there, it’s a matter of adding the :login_required symbol in your controller.
There is also a way to generate roles for users and give them different access permissions.
3. Tierje Tjervaag - Web development Testing and Debugging Tools.
Tierje had a short but nice wrap-up of several web-testing tools. He advised not to start with client-side debugging.
However, browser debugging is interesting in the following cases:
Tierje mentioned the following tools for Firefox:
It’s a favorite tool of mine and Tierje showed the Profiling options among other tips like changing CSS info on the fly and seeing the results update dynamically in the browser pane. I also like the Inspect tool.
A tool by Yahoo to diagnose and advise about why your website could be slow.
François Beausoleil had one or two feedbacks during the night to correct some glitches in the presentations. François was also filming the event, so we can expect to have the presentations online someday.
Mat and Carl asked for feedback for the event. It seems everybody’s happy with how things are going currently.
I was glad to meet up with Hugo Frappier, Francis Wu, Chris Scott, François Beausoleil, Caroline, Mat, Carl, Fred and Marc-André and the others.
Fred generously pointed out that the next meeting would be in Standout Jobs’ headquarters, as they’ll be able to host more people.
Maybe the donuts will make a come-back?
Other Reports:
1. Djief
2. Heri
3. Marc-André