Last night I attended the
Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NovaRUG) meeting in Reston last night with
Dave Thomas (PragDave) and
Chad Fowler. It was a completely packed house and the temperatures were a bit hight in the room, but it was well worth the sweating to attend.
Paul Barry presented first on
Merb and gave a really good demonstration of some of the capabilities in comparison to Ruby on Rails. If you're not familiar with Merb, it is a lightweight Model View Controller framework written in Ruby. It was written by
Ezra Zygmuntowicz in response to trying and giving up on making Ruby on Rails thread safe. You can find his presentation materials
here.
It was mentioned that there will be a Ruby conference in the Northern Virginia area upcoming I'd like to see if we can get some IronRuby in there instead of all those Java guys with JRuby. We'll see what happens, but for right now, everything seems to be in flux. Stay tuned!
Next up, Dave Thomas talked about the Ruby object model with a very good presentation. Below you can find some of my pictures I took from the event. Forgive the quality of the images, but you can tell that it was a crowded place! Anyhow, it was a really good talk about the object model, how the scoping of self and the resolution of classes and methods are done deep down in Ruby. It was an excellent presentation and I was definitely excited by his passion for the community and the technology.
First we have Dave talking about the inheritance chain of Ruby objects.
Then here's Dave talking about the method resolution.
I had a chance to chat with Dave afterwards on F# as he has been looking into OCaml lately, where F# got most of its functionality from. It's his hope that F# succeeds and I ultimately think it will. So, I told him to give it a try. Anyhow, it was a great night and good to reach out to the community. The DC area has a pretty rich community of .NET, Ruby and Java programmers that's really refreshing to see. Until next time...
