== April Meeting ==
==== April 13th, 2005 6:30pm at Free Geek, 1741 SE 10th Ave ====

Ruby on Rails by Lucas Carlson ([slides http://s5presents.com/show/252])

Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/) is a 9 month old web framework 
that provides shortcuts to many aspects of web development. Many of you 
have already heard of Ruby on Rails since a lot of people have been 
proclaiming 10x increases in productivity recently. This presentation 
will introduce you to the fundamentals of the framework by creating a 
simple application from scratch. You will then learn some of the more 
advanced features of Rails, like how to setup XML-RPC and SOAP API's 
for the application and how easy it is to integrate Ajax features in 
forms. You will also be exposed to some non-trivial Rails code from an 
existing website (http://webcollaborator.com/) in order to judge how 
well Rails holds up when implementing non-trivial concepts.

Knowledge of Ruby is optional, there will be a short crash course at the beginning of the talk.

Lucas Carlson comes from a background of almost 8 years of PHP 
development. He discovered Ruby on Rails for himself 6 months ago and 
has been gainfully employed developing in Rails ever since. He has also 
made contributions to the framework. For more information about Lucas, 
see http://rufy.com/