Ruby Users of Minnesota meeting
Tonight’s RUM meeting was a great one, with better attendance than last month’s meeting. Tom gave an overview of the file_column plugin for Ruby on Rails (and also has a meeting summary on his blog). It has just about everything you need to handle file/image uploads built-in, including resizing, thumbnails and cropping (if you have RMagick installed, of course, for which I’d recommend using Locomotive).
We talked a little about PDF generation, and I promised to post some links to libraries I’ve been researching. Promise fulfilled:
- Doc_convert - a library that converts documents to and from html, rtf, pdf, and word. Has a ton of dependencies though so I haven’t tried it.
- RTex plugin for Rails - haven’t tried this one either, but it seems like it might be a decent way to generate PDFs from Rails views.
- All my ‘pdf’ links on Feedmarker
Then Luke (last name? site?) gave a presentation on Sparklines and the only Ruby implementation that looks usable: Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Sparklines. I love the way these things look but still haven’t found a compelling reason/justification for including them in an app. But I’m still looking.
Speaking of Geoffrey, his Gruff library was a breath of fresh air when I was looking for something to help me do graphs for Teacherly.com. His CSS graphs library doesn’t look half bad either.
Charlie Nutter talked about the latest milestone release of JRuby, which sounds wonderful even though I don’t really understand it. At one point he was talking about a similar project that was “trying to implement Ruby in Ruby” and I just kinda got stuck in that loop. Still cool though.
Lastly, Dan Grisgby gave us a summary of what he saw at Etech, which you can read about on his blog. Suffice to say that multi-touch user interfaces are way cooler than anything anyone anywhere is working on (except the multi-touch user interface people). As soon as this is implemented for the web I’m sure it will bring browsing for porn (isn’t that what the web is for?) to a whole new level.
I’ll be out of town (Brazil and Argentina) for the next meeting, but I’m looking forward to talking a little about Feedmarker at the May meeting.
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