March Silicon Valley Rails meetup

Our experiment last month with a Tuesday no-pizza meetup was a success, so we're doing it again on this coming Tuesday 3/31 at LinkedIn headquarters. We had several promising proposals for talks, but most speakers could only make it in April; luckily, Arun Gupta can make it on Tuesday 3/31, so to have the best of both worlds I'll be pinch-hitting with a talk on Haml & Sass to fill out the March program. Then we'll have a full lineup for another meetup in late April.

Without further ado:

Develop with Pleasure, Deploy with Fun: GlassFish and NetBeans for a Better Rails Experience

Arun Gupta

This presentation walks through the process for running Rails and Merb applications on GlassFish, an open-source Java application server. It also explains the inner workings of GlassFish so that developers understand what's happening under the hood. It demonstrates how popular Rails and Merb applications can be easily deployed on GlassFish without any modification, and shows how v3 Gem can be used as an effective alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel. The session explains how the pluggable framework in GlassFish works to allow any Rack-based framework to be supported.

The talk also demonstrates how NetBeans provides a comprehensive IDE for developing, running, and debugging a Rails application directly on GlassFish - all without using any Java code.

Beautiful Views with Haml and Awesome Stylesheets with Sass

Michael Hartl

Haml is a drop-in replacement for embedded Ruby (ERb) that produces Rails templates of rare economy and beauty. We'll start by building a Haml template from scratch, starting with static HTML and then adding dynamic Ruby. We'll also discuss how to convert legacy ERb templates to Haml. In the process of getting our hands dirty with live code examples, we'll see how making views with Haml is both fast and fun.

With Haml you get Sass for free, and even if you hate Haml you'll love Sass. Offering a syntactically awesome alternative to traditional stylesheets, Sass fixes some of the more obvious defects of CSS, allowing (among other things) assignable variables (such as site-wide color schemes) and the easy production of verbose CSS in development (for debugging) and compressed CSS in production (for speed).

Hope to see you all there!