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please don't feed the rails programmers

topicvote application screen grab

My friend Jane Macfarlane and I did a presentation at the East Bay Ruby Meetup on Thursday, December 14, 2006. After a brief introduction we created a Ruby on Rails application…live.

Writing code is challenging, but becomes truly sporting when you have 20 or 30 people watching you. When I told some developer friends that I was doing this, I got replies like “Oh, this should be exciting” — and I don’t think they meant that in a good way. Of course we rehearsed and scripted the event so it went smoothly, for the most part.

One exciting moment for me occurred when I was trying to install the acts_as_authenticated plugin. The command failed and I was briefly baffled, when an audience member asked if it required network access. Of course this was the issue, but the bigger question to me was whether I was going to bump into similar issues through out the presentation — thankfully, I didn’t.

The concept was to build an application from start to finish in the allotted time of 1.5 hours. I’ve done this before and knew the application had to be simple, but I also wanted something that was not a standard rails demo applications: blog, todo list, or recipes. I really wanted to show some key features of rails and I wanted the process to have at least 2 major phases in order to show incremental development. Jane and I settled on an application to allow people to submit and vote on future topics for East Bay Ruby Meetup meetings. We called the application TopicVote.

My thanks go to William Sobel for doing the normally thankless job of organizing this meetup and this particular event.

For those that asked for the presentation/demo material, here it is.

If you want to run the application, of course you will need to have:

Then to install and run, you will need to:

  1. untar and unzip the application archive (tgz) file
  2. create the databases (topicvote_development and topicvote_test)
  3. update the config/database.yml file with your specific database information
  4. cd into the application directory, and …
  5. run it (script/server)
  6. Oh yeah, then visit the server with your favorite browser at http://localhost:3000

Here are the files:

Finally, during the Q&A we briefly discussed a program called DENIM. For information on DENIM, please check out my DENIM article.

If you’ve read this far, please consider rating me at Working With Rails.

Thank you.

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