Ruby On Rails

Our speaker on this interesting and hot topic is Jonathan Conway of Agile Evolved : cv and abstract below.

CV

Jonathan Conway is the Director of Agile Evolved, a Ruby on Rails consultancy based in London.

After being a staunch Java purist for several years, Jonathan stumbled upon Ruby on Rails in August 2004 and was immediately impressed by the simplicity and productivity gains offered by this new web development framework.

He was so taken with Ruby on Rails that he left his job as the Technical and Team Lead for Netengines Worldwide Ltd to startup his own company specialising in Ruby on Rails development, training and support.

Before being enamored with Ruby on Rails, Jonathan had worked on several diverse projects ranging from online financial portals, real-time trading applications for Java enabled mobile devices and even rich user interfaces utilising Javascript and the DOM years before it became the “in thing”.

Abstract

Ruby on Rails is the new darling of the web's digerati and has taken the web development world by storm. It can be found to power a large proportion of the latest and greatest of the Web 2.0 world, but why is this?

The talk will cover the following topics:

• A brief overview of Ruby on Rails
• Ruby as an aesthetic language
• Ruby based DSL's and their use within Rails
• Beautiful testing with Rails
• Javascript-less Javascript with RJS

More info

As the Rails home page says, Ruby on Rails is an open source Web framework that's optimised for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favouring convention over configuration.

Screencasts and presentations and more info in the Ruby on Rails wiki

See aso the Wikipedia entry

Our January 2006 speaker, Peter Gradwell, is providing Ruby on Rails hosting

Joint session with the BCS OSSG

Committee owners: Adrian and Farough