May 2009 Archives

June 2009 Meeting

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 8th of June, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at either their offices or one of their overflow venues. The venue we get is dependent on how many people register and the availability of sponsorship to pay for a larger room. Do your bit by registering early.

Agenda

RDF in Rails

Patrick Sinclair will be talking about publishing RDF from Rails and getting the community to participate in Linked Data.

A video of Patrick’s talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

DSL Or A Code Smell…

Abdel A. Saleh recently ran a code review of a DSL he was writing at work. He’s going to let us know what he learned from that experience:

DSLs are very powerful tools but are they always necessary? This is a tale in code about my work on a small ‘Request Throttling’ library where I thought I needed a DSL but it turned out I was sorely mistaken. I’ll highlight some common DSLing techniques and the decisions that steered me away from them.

A video of Abdel’s talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

2 Apps, 1 Test : Distributed Ruby Unit Testing

Tom Lea has a distributed testing framework called Drunit that he’s going to tell us about. Drunit (from the Readme) is:

A library for running tests across multiple applications from a single test case.

and, crucially:

Over 14% more awesome than a bag of chips.

A video of Tom’s talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Pub

At the end of all this we like to drop our polite facade and scramble to be first at the bar and woe betide anyone that gets in our way. The pub we head to is The Crown Tavern, which is conveniently located close to all of the venues that Skills Matter provide. If the main meeting doesn’t fit with your hectic schedule surely you can fit in a pint on the way home? We aim to finish up the talks at 8pm, so come to the pub for then and chat with your local ruby community.

Registration

We need people to register with Skills Matter if they are planning on attending. Registration lets Skills Matter know how many people to expect to turn up and plan the venue accordingly. If enough people register we need to book a larger venue, but that can take some time so Skills Matter need some notice to do so. So please register as early as you can. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don’t want that!

There’s also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

Posted by Murray Steele on May 19, 2009

May 2009 Meeting

The next meeting of LRUG will be on Monday the 18th of May, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm. As usual our hosts Skills Matter will provide the space at their offices. The room is currently at capacity, but if you register with them they’ll put you on a waiting list.

Agenda

Ruby FFI

Sean O'Halpin will be talking about Ruby FFI, probably using his FFI-ncurses gem to provide some examples.

Treetop

Roland Swingler has been looking at Treetop:

Regular expressions are great but they’re unreadable when complex, and there are some things they just can’t do. The alternative is to build a language parser – but that’s really hard, isn’t it? In this talk, I’ll try and dispell that idea and show how building little languages in ruby is really simple. I’ll show two examples: defining a mini-language from scratch to build XMPP bots, and using it as part of your screen-scraping toolbox.

A video of Roland’s talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Scheme

James Coglan is writing a Scheme interpreter in Ruby:

Scheme is a member of the Lisp family of languages, and is an excellent place to start if you’re interested in writing your own language. It’s small and simple to parse, yet has several advanced features that are only now becoming mainstream. Based on Heist, my main interpreter project, I present a brief overview of Scheme and use Treetop to create a small runtime that includes booleans, integer arithmetic, variables, user-defined functions, conditionals, recursion and lexical closures.

A video of James' talk is available on the Skills Matter site.

Pub

It’s tradition at LRUG to head to the local pub after the talks to relax and chat with other rubyists. We go to The Crown Tavern which is a short walk from either of the venues Skills Matter provides. If you can’t make the main meeting you’ll find plenty of rubyists propping up the bar from about 8:00pm onwards after the talks. Come along!

Registration

Please register with Skills Matter if you are planning to come (or even just thinking about it). Please register as early as you can. In fact, go and do it now! The reason for this is that if a lot of folk want to come we obviously need a larger room and Skills Matter need about a week’s notice to book it. They’ll only do so if the registrations dictate it. If you register late they might not have enough time to book a larger room and you might get put on a waiting list or simply turned away. We don’t want that!

There’s also an upcoming event for those of us that love online calendaring, but this is not a place to indicate attendance in a meaningful way for Skills Matter.

Posted by Murray Steele on May 05, 2009