March Madness (er Meeting) Minutes
Posted by jvanfleet, Thu Mar 15 16:39:00 UTC 2007
For those of you who missed March’s meeting, it was the most successful one that we’ve had thus far.
Ryan Daigle spoke to us about REST and ActiveResource. This is an up-and-coming element of Rails development, and it was plain to see from his presentation that the concept has tremendous power. We saw that using ActiveResource to consume web services created by your own or others’ Rails applications is straightforward, and it allows an independent applications to communicate with each other with unprecedented ease. I know that I personally will need some practice with these techniques before I can fully internalize them, but his content gave me a tremendous head-start on a starting place. Ryan also had an interactive session with ARes objects themselves and pointed us to the beginning of some documentation work at ContactsAPI.
The crowd was eager to ask questions and share their experiences about this new technology, partly because it’s not as widely covered as ActiveRecord or RJS. Ryan did an excellent job making sure that no one left with any questions.
We had more than a dozen attendees, our best showing for a meeting where beer wasn’t involved. Thanks to the Charlottesville folks that came out; you helped the group live up to its name. Dominion Digital provided the pizza and sodas, and you’ll now find them in our sidebar as a sponsor! Leave a comment if you are interested in providing corporate sponsorship for one of our meetings.
When I can find the USB cable to hook up my camera, I’ll post some pictures.
Please stay tuned to the Google Group and to this website for more information about upcoming meetings and events. We look forward to having you!!!
