Real World Fun with ActiveResource
I couldn’t necessarily pick a better title for the post, but essentially it’s the title of a presentation I gave last night to the Melbourne Ruby User Group.
The talk was a general overview about ActiveResource (a Ruby based library for talking to RESTful Web Services and deserialising the resultant XML into objects), based on some recent experience I had using it on a reporting project.
I did present a bit of sample code, but as this was literally just a bit of cut-and-paste from some Rails scaffold code, I’ve decided to not push it up to the cloud (but of course, I’m happy to do so if people are interested), and I’ve proceeded to publish a copy of the slides up to my account on SlideShare. You can find those here.
Railscamping
It has been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been a bit too busy with some personal and professional stuff lately to be able to sit down and write a good piece for this.
A few things of interest which I’ve been involved with lately:
Last month, I presented a short piece on getting Rails applications up and running on top of JRuby for the Melbourne Ruby User’s Group. It was based on a number of experiences which I had on a team dealing with getting a new Rails application up and running. I also covered some details on the tools required to get it up onto a Java application server. Considering I’ve not done a big talk like that for a very long time, it happened to end up quite well (and got some great feedback from other people in the group).
For those who are interested, I’ve gone and uploaded the slides from the presentation onto slideshare, which you can find here.
On top of that, I was also at the most recent Railscamp – a big meetup of a bunch of Aussie Rails developers & enthusiasts. Being surrounded by a good weekend of geekery was great fun, and the vibe of the coding going on in the background during the days was quite motivating. My major contribution was a small piece on developing games in Ruby using the Gosu framework.
For those who have a bit of a random interest in it, I’ve uploaded the code I knocked up over the weekend onto Github, which you can access it here.
Overall, the weekend was a great bit of fun, including meeting a bunch of awesome people in other parts of the country. All I think I need to say – is rock on the next one!