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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!

The Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup will have its next meeting on Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 7 p.m. at LinkedIn's headquarters in Mountain View. Pizza will be provided thanks to the generous sponsorship of Sun Microsystems. Our speakers this month are Henry Work from TechCrunch and Prashant Srinivasan from Sun.

Henry's talk, "Designing the CrunchBase API", will describe the versioned API for CrunchBase, a database of startup information. The CrunchBase API is optimized for "developer happiness", both for the end-user and for the maintainer: it requires no developer accounts, no request limiting, and pumps out pretty-printed JSON data. Henry will also go over some lessons learned in terms of caching, attribution, and widget creation, as well as show off some of the services that have integrated with CrunchBase using the API.

Prashant will be talking about "Ruby in OpenSolaris Web Stack: Why and How?", which will introduce the OpenSolaris Web Stack, an open-source enterprise application stack, and discuss its Ruby/Rails support, why to use it, and how to use it. DTrace and Zones integration will be covered briefly. Olio, an open effort to create an application to evaluate the performance of web applications, will also be introduced.

We're looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Address:
2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

Parking:
Please feel free to park anywhere in the parking lot

Conf. Room:
LinkedIn HQ 2nd Floor Kitchen and Open Area

The Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup will have its next meeting on September 25th, 2008! We'll be meeting this month at LinkedIn's headquarters in Mountain View. Very special thanks to Michael Hartl, co-founder of Insoshi, for organizing this month's event and booking the speakers and venue! Insoshi is an open-source social networking platform written in Ruby on Rails. The meetup will start at **7PM**.

We have great speakers lined up this month. Emmett Shear from Justin.tv will be sharing his experiences with "Rails Tricks For Fun And Profit At Justin.tv". Justin.tv is building a destination site for broadcasting and watching live video online while chatting with friends. The company’s mission is to enable viewers and broadcasters to interact and exchange ideas in real time through chat and live video.

Adam Wiggins from Heroku will talk with us about "Instant Rails Deployment to Heroku with Git". Heroku is an online deployment system for Ruby on Rails apps. You can create a rails app via your browser, and then with an online editor, you begin to customize it. Their focus is on providing the popular Ruby on Rails platform with the easiest deployment possible: one that regular users do not have to worry about.

LinkedIn has graciously offered to provide food and drink. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Address:
2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

And here is the google maps link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2029+Stierlin+Ct,+Mountain+
View,+CA+94043&sll=37.350697,-121.993271&sspn=0.009979,0.014055&ie=UTF8&ll=3
7.427383,-122.07113&spn=0.009968,0.014055&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.42337,-122.07
1953&panoid=9WjD7kHhZjfiYLAEW8vVnQ&cbp=1,86.02587497481221,,1,0.626146305519
2173

Parking:
Please feel free to park anywhere in the parking lot

Conf. Room:
LinkedIn HQ 2nd Floor Kitchen and Open Area

LinkedIn has been using Ruby on Rails for about 2 years. Projects that we
implemented using Ruby on Rails:
- LinkedIn Mobile, a mobile web application which designed for iPhone and
mobile devices which supports XHTML MP. Recently we added support for the
iPhone native application written in Objective C and using Oauth protocol.
- Bumper Sticker, a Facebook application which has 17 million users and 900
million page views per month.
- NewIn, a visualization application created during a hack day which
leverages Google Maps and LinkedIn REST API to display newly joined users.
- OpenSocial Applications, applications that build on top on LinkedIn
OpenSocial platform and will appear on LinkedIn Homepage for the OpenSocial
initial launch.

The Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup will have its next meeting on July 26th, 2007! We will once again be meeting at Verisign's Mountain View offices. Special thanks to Lysander David for stepping up and offering the space. A lot of people have suggested that the meetups were scheduled a little earlier in the day than was convenient, so the meetup will start at ***7PM***.

We have great speakers lined up this month. Marc Hedlund and Coda Hale from Wesabe are coming through to share their work with us. Wesabe "...makes it easy to better understand how you spend your money and links you to a community of people dedicated to helping each other make better financial decisions." They've recently launched the Wesabe API, and incredibly cool set of tools that gives you a REST API not only to Wesabe, but to all of the banks and financial institutions that Wesabe supports.

A second speaker may be announced pending confirmation. Time permitting, we'll have an open forum for discussion towards the end. Verisign has once again graciously offered to supply pizza and refreshments. I'd like to thank everyone for their patience with the erratic meetup schedule since Insider Pages moved to San Francisco. Thanks to the offerings of space and help from Lysander and others, we should be back on a regular schedule from here out. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

*** PLEASE NOTE THE NEW LOCATION IN MOUNTAIN VIEW ***

Lysander has provided directions:

From South San Jose:
-------------------------
1. Head north on 101

2. Go under Mountain View - Alviso Freeway ( 237 )
and take the very next exit which should
be 237 South.
You know you went past it if you get to Ellis.

3. Cross over 101 and take the very next
exit on Maude.

4. Go through the lights on Maude and turn right at the
next set of lights on to Middlefield Road

5. Go through the first set of lights and turn left
at the next set of lights into the
parking lot of VeriSign.
You know you went too far if you reach the light rail tracks.

6. There are two buildings between the light rail tracks
and 237: Building 5 and and Building 6.
Building 5 is closest to the light rail tracks.
The UC Davis conference room is in Building 5.
Please enter through the doors directly facing
Middlefield Road.

From the Peninusula:
------------------------
1. Head south on 101.

2. Take the Ellis Street exit and turn right onto Ellis Street.

3. Proceed on Ellis until it ends at Middlefield Road.

4. Turn left on Middlefield Road.

5. Turn right into the VeriSign parking lot after crossing
the light rail tracks.

6. There are two buildings between the light rail tracks
and 237: Building 5 and and Building 6.
Building 5 is closest to the light rail tracks.
The UC Davis conference room is in Building 5.
Please enter through the doors directly facing
Middlefield Road.
Show full description

When and Where:

Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 6:00 PM
Mountain View , CA 94043

The Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup will have its next meeting on March 15th, 2007! Please join us at Insider Pages' Redwood Shores office for another fun evening.

Brian Moore from feder8 will be coming through to speak about his experience using Rails to build feder8.com, focusing on performance analysis of Rails applications.

Rich Morin, from Canta Forda Computer Laboratory, will be talking about documentation. He'll introduce the topic, discuss existing documentation tools, and will give a demonstration of Arti, his tool for documenting Rails applications. Rich is interested in meetup members' experiences with documentation and is looking forward to a group discussion.

Insider Pages/Citysearch will once again supply pizza and refreshments. See you there!

-Zack