Hi All,
Sorry, as usual my notes come a day or two after the meet
;-) . It's good to see you all there, and I didn't count, it felt like there are atleast 20 of us there. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Which, I think is a good number, and I hope we see more people, old and new in our midst.
The meeting started off a few minutes after 4pm, with my welcome and is followed by Rajesh Babu's metaprogramming talk. He started off with his approach to the talk, explaining that he would introduce metaprogramming from a Smalltalk perspective, slowly dipping into Ruby for comparision. He showed off the Squeak environment, and how the variables and the stack can be inspected at realtime in the environment.
He went on to explain that since Squeak is a self-contained environment, things like reference counting can be done easily, and proceeded to show some code of how Ruby is implemented in C. He showed us how things like method_missing is implemented in Ruby, and went on to show source code of active record on how some of the DSL aspects are done. There were questions on continuations and what led him to Smalltalk in the first place. He explained that Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, has done some work in alternative education, which Rajesh is interested in.
[* folks, I know I missed somethings there, please fill in if it's plain incorrect or something hasn't been explained properly. I promise, I will take proper notes at the meets next time. If anybody wants to do this, I will be happy to hand it over. Only qualification is that you should turn up for all the meets (almost) ;-)]
It was followed up by my talk on Rails 1.1 features. I spoke on some interesting new features like RJS templates and how they make ajax dead simple, polymorphic associations, how we can now add a real model for the habtm relationship with has_many :through, how you can now create your own api for your webapp with respond_to, and nested queries with the help of newly added 'with_scope' method, and how to get out of the scope using with_exclusive_scope (I forgot the method name, and led to some embarrassing searching through the docs). There was also some talk on smaller features, like newly added calculation methods to the model classes, cascading eager loading, etc.
It was followed up with some discussion on future events, frequency of the events, about inviting out-station speakers once in a while, having special meets when a really significant Ruby/Rails personality turns up, etc. Thanks to you all for coming, hope you had some fun and learned something important. We are gonna get much more organized, and have more talks crammed into that 2 to 2.5 hours that we can manage.
Special Thanks:
* There was also my request for some hosting space if possible, for our planned website. Senthil Nayagam of Broadspire has graciously offered to give us some hosting space, after speaking to his folks. Thank you, Senthil.
* I want to thank Mr. Udayan Banerjee and Mr. P. Sankarasubramanian of NIIT for letting us use their premises and taking the pains to organize everything at the venue, and making sure that we are comfortable, arranging snacks (the coffee was really good) intently listening to both the talks, and asking some thoughtful questions on the subject. We could not have hoped for better hosts.
Thank you all reading this mail (I know it's loooong), please add if I missed anything. See you all at the next meet, and I will publish the agenda for the next meet in the coming weeks.
Vamsee.
