PDX.rb Keeps On Rolling
Posted by Jeremy Voorhis Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:41:00 GMT
Portland, Oregon is fortunate to have a beautiful Ruby users group, and last night’s meeting confirmed that to me even more. For those of you who couldn’t be there, or would simply like to peek inside, here is a quick summary.
Mercurial
John Labowitz clued us in about Mercurial, a decentralized scm tool in the same class as Darcs and BZR. The tool is still rather young, but seems to be improving rapidly. After covering some of its features and their usage, John deployed a Rails app from a Mercurial repository with a relatively simple Capistrano recipe. After listening, here is my take on Mercurial:
- Decentralized – every working copy is a branch
- Patches may be cherrypicked a la Darcs
- Commands and output mirror Subversion when reasonable – svn users should be at home with the command line tool
- Changesets are given a local revision number, for those of us who still think in Subversion
I’ve not used decentralized scm for programming-in-the-large, but have been using Darcs for one-off personal projects. Next time, I’ll kick the tires on Mercurial myself.
OS X Sync Services
Ben Bleything gave a talk about implementing Ruby applications that use Apple’s Sync Services. (I am not an OS X hacker myself, and I was mostly satisfied when Ben said Sync Services is like the windows registry, but for data.)
A Sync Services application typically has its own data store, but subscribes to updates from Sync Services and occasionally publishes its own. The examples that Ben showed involved observing the changes pushed by Sync Services via Growl notifications, and manipulating OS X address book entries via Ruby.
The examples also gave us a taste of Ruby/Cocoa; if there is a wrapper for the library you need, things are good. If not, you need to fire up the Objective-C documentation and translate the interface to something the Ruby/Objective-C bridge can understand. (Ben, help me out if I’ve messed anything up :)
Craftsmanship
After the talks, the group faithfully migrates to the Lucky Lab brewpub. Informally, I got a chance to talk to some fellow group members about the Rails workshop I will be holding in November. The name I have chosen for the series is Craft, referencing the passionate developer’s sense of craftsmanship as well as his desire to create.
Eric Wilhelm, joint member of PDX.rb and the Portland Perl Mongers, brought it to my attention that the last PDX Perl Mongers meeting held a panel on craftsmanship. The panel included Bricolage developer and esteemed acquaintance David Wheeler, bicycle machinist Dan Falck, and science fiction author David D. Levine. The podcast is available via the meeting page.
Props for taking the interdisciplinary approach!