June meeting

Tom Copeland — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:43:00 -0500

The June NovaRUG meeting will be Wednesday, June 18 at the FGM headquarters from 7 PM to 9 PM or so. Pizza and drinks start at 6:30.

FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building

Directions

The meeting will be sponsored by RosettaStone , who has graciously offered to buy the pizza (They are hiring Ruby developers right now, BTW).

Also we will give out a door prize of a pass to the RubyNation.

The speakers will be Chris Bucchere of BDG and Arild Shirazi of FGM.

The first speaker will be Chris Bucchere who will speak on "To Portal or Not To Portal -- How to Build DRY, Truly Modular Mashups in Rails". Those with a background in portal software know that portals make it remarkably easy to mashup data/content and applications from various sources into on composite web site. But do you really need a potentially expensive and complicated off-the-shelf portal to do this? Or is it possible to build a composite application using Rails, partials and the embed_action plugin? Come hear how a portal-industry veteran and developer of one of the most widely-used enterprise portals built a social networking site in Rails using a portal product and then, with a little reorganization of the Ruby code, removed the portal product altogether. Did chaos ensue or was the finished product even better without the portal? More than just a compare-and-contrast look at Rails inside of a portal environment and out, this talk will dive deep into the Rails view and layout architecture to show how to aggregate content in a DRY, no-fuss manner.

The second speaker will be Arild Shirazi who will speak on "CSS for the Developer". Arild will talk from a developer's perspective about the black art of CSS. Anyone can waste hours trying to get the web page looking (almost|just) perfect. Hopefully, I will provide some insight into creating layout and design in an easy and maintainable way. Along the way we'll discuss alternatives to the dreaded <table> layout, and guiding principles to help keep your web content (HTML) separate from the presentation (CSS).

NovaRUG: June meeting

June meeting