ruby on rails brisbane brigade meetup

So I made it to the Brisbane Ruby on Rails Brigade meetup.

Talks for tonight and notes:
- Widgy by Flexa (sponsoring this meetup)
Javascript widgeting framework
Make doing interfaces easier, automate a lot of the coding involved. For eg, ajax uploader, dynamic data form widget.
Doesn't work well under IE, fine under firefox.
Data forms take a JSON object; properties are top-level entities. Makes referencing very easy.
Looking to open source soon, and looking for developers to volunteer to work on it.
http://flexa.com.au
http://flexaonline.org
facebook group: "Flexa"

A side note: apparently I'm not at #rorobne, but at #brrb. Learn something new every day, I guess.


- Intro HTML5 & CSS3 by Bo
HTML5 - Being drafted by W3C. Semantic and clean markup. New elements such as section, article, header, footer, nav, time, figure, audio, video.
Lots of new APIs for interactivity.
Browser-based validation.
CSS3 - More selectors. Media queries - context sensitive rules (eg, auto-mobile column breakdown). Multiple background images, rounded images, and multiple column flowing content.
(DrNic is That Guy who trolls and heckles in meetings).
HTML4: What's wrong with it? - It isn't semantic. Classes being used as style elements instead of descriptive elements. You can do it cleanly, but most people don't.
Semantic web is a lot easier to work with both as a user and a developer. Browsers can display information contextually. Graceful degradation of elements such as email, url, and date to text.
Good resource at http://camendesign.com

Damn. I'm going to have to learn HTML4 properly now.

- sort_by by Ryan
Apparently, this talk is a biblical epic.
Used for sorting tables. Hooks into will_paginate. Simple api, sensible defaults. Patches welcome.

- Javascript Testing by DrNic
Intro of cord wrestling.
Unit testing for javascript that is easy. Plugin by name of 'blue-ridge'. http://github.com/relavence/blue-ridge .
Rails generators, screwunit, and rake task for headless testing (without using a browser). Reproduction of errors should be a lot easier (eg, for IE errors). Quick demo of doing validation of a form prior to post. Must tell the guys at work about this. We use waaaaaaaaaay too much js and have waaaaaaaay too few tests.

- make_resourceful by Alan
Attempts to solve the non-DRY of restful methods which are basically empty. Interesting. Will have to look at that too.

- FutureRuby by DrNic
Will have to google this. Heroku mentioned, for deployment from git. He should write a blog post about it, I don't quite follow.

Running out of battery, oh no! May have to do a follow-up post after I get home.

- web based iphone by Nathan
Some quick tricks to scale your website nicely for display in iphone, including rotating.

- bundle updates by Greg
cd to bundles, loops through bundles, does .git, or .svn. He's been told to make a gist.

.... no battery left! Beer and food to come.