July Monthly Meeting

We'll start our meeting at 6pm with our beginner's track which is open to all but is targeted at newer programmers. The topic is "Getting started with test driving your code".

The food and beverages will arrive by 6:30pm where you can eat, drink and mingle with your fellow Rubyists for 45 minutes while the rest of the crowd arrives.

Around 7:15pm we'll have our first presentation by Toby Crawley. He'll be presenting on Torquebox 4.

An introduction to TorqueBox 4

Historically, TorqueBox (http://torquebox.org) has been an application server for JRuby applications built on top of JBossAS (http://jbossas.jboss.org/). It provides commodity services to applications (http, scheduled jobs, messaging, caching, etc), with high-availability and load-balancing when used in a cluster.

TorqueBox 4 is currently in development, and no longer requires you to use the application server container - many of the commodity services are now available as gems, and can be used directly by any JRuby application. If that application ever needs the clustering features provided by the container, the application can be deployed to a cluster and take advantage of those features with little or no code changes.

The talk will be a code review (with some live coding) demonstrating TorqueBox 4 features, hopefully culminating with deploying our app to a cluster.

Our second talk will be titled Design for Developers.

Ask most engineers to design an application and you'll probably get a website that looks like a spreadsheet. That's because they think that being able to design well is usually something people are born with.

Whats the secret to design that your UX colleagues aren't telling you? Come find out!

Raman Sinha (not a designer) will give a talk on basic design principles that you can use on your very next commit to increase the aesthetics and usability of your web application. We'll discuss typography, layout, and colors as well as frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.

Thanks to Pivotal Labs for hosting our meeting and providing the food and beverage. We'll see you all Tuesday night!