Houston Ruby / Ruby on Rails Monthly Meetup

Appetizers

7:00-7:15 Discuss Ruby news

7:15-7:45 Rails Essential Gems (newbie friendly) - @jwo continues his Rails Essential Gems series, covering WickedPDF -- a way to create PDFs in Rails that doesn't suck. Write in HTML/CSS, including Javascript, graphs, and awesome stuff!

Main Course

7:45 -- Creating a DSL in Ruby - Derek Kastner

Ruby helped popularize the idea of Domain Specific Languages - specialized languages that solve a particular business problem. Ruby's syntax, class model, and support for blocks made it easy to quickly develop tools like Rake, RSpec, and the Rails router. We'll talk about what a DSL is, why or why not you should use one, and how to do it by walking through a real-world application I helped develop.