Around 20+ rubyists got together on a rainy evening of Saturday to take part in PuneRuby's August Meet
.
The evening started with quick round of introductions. There were college students, fairly new rubyists and some expert Railers.

Prototype demo of COEP college website using Hobo

The first session of the day was by web team of COEP College where they demonstrated the usage of Hobo for developing an internal CMS college website. Amongst other features they explained DRYML and Rapid tag library of hobo which allows creation of user defined tags which can be reused across different views.
With just few commands, for creating rails application skeleton and then for creating migrations for database tables, one can very quickly develop an application which has out-of-the-box support for user authentication, layouts, live search etc. It sounded like default admin interface provided by Django framework.
When asked why did they not choose something on the lines of Drupal for CMS. the answer was sweet, they wanted to learn something new and have been hearing about Rail from a while.

ActiveScafold - Ajax on Rails

The second session of the evening was by Gautam Rege of Josh consultants where he talked about ActiveScaffold(AS) plugin. he explained how easy it was for him to really have all those Ajaxy features in his Rails application with just 5 lines of code in his controllers.
The negatives that he(or audience) shared about ActiveScaffold included,
1. Experienced perf issues for loading the list page with not so many entries. The benefit of doubt here goes to Active Scaffold because Gautam was running on Webrick.
2. Although AS has neat extension module, it can become a pain in the ass if you do not understand the internals of AS.
3. Scaffold is generally not recommended for production systems. so AS could fall in to that category. but what it surely gives is a headstart.

Using YSLOW & Migration test helper

Raghavendra Shet started explaining about Migration test helper, which he had used in one of his projects. he shared the problems and their solutions that he had faced while working with migration test helper plugin.
About testing migrations I had mixed feelings. Is it really worth spending time testing your migrations? I mean how many times have you run the down method of your migrations?

Raghavendra then explained about a plugin to Mozilla Firefox by Yahoo called YSLOW which can be used to find performance issues in your webpage. he explained about 11 points which YSLOW stresses upon.
One of the points was making fewer HTTP connections, which can be accomplished by combining all your javascripts and all your stylesheets in to one file respectively. Asset packager can be used to do so.
Not having inline styles and javascripts was another point Raghavendra explained.

During the end of meet, their were discussions about JRuby. Amitabh told that how similar projects in Python, like Jython and Iron Python were not as successful as Python.
Steve explained how personally he thought it was not a good idea to use extensions to Java with in your JRuby application. He told that projects like Rubinius and Ruby VM could certainly overcome the perf issues and how difficult things would be if you had to remove those Java linkages when you moved to these Interpreters.

Freeman asked about the plans of PuneRuby group going forward. I answered him saying that the outcome I was looking for from such meets was some projects, plugins that some of us can do together in our
leisure time.

For all the beginners to Ruby language, there is a good news. Our very own PuneRuby group member Satish Talim is going to conduct online Ruby classes starting 27th Of August. More details are here.

We are going to meet again on 29th September. so see you there.