Portland Ruby Brigade: September Meeting - CouchDB, iPhone + Cucumber, Puppet's Parsers & DSL

Organized by Igal Koshevoy

Time: Tuesday, September 1, 2009 from 79pm

Location: Robert Half Technology, 2nd Floor Conference Room, 222 SW Columbia St Portland OR 97201 US

Agenda

Add this event to your calendar: http://calagator.org/events/1250457540

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland, Oregon, area. Join other developers for presentations and discussions about Ruby and its uses.

VENUE: This meeting’s space is kindly provided by Robert Half Technology at their 2nd Floor Conference Room. Enter the KOIN Tower from SW Columbia between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, take the back elevators to the 2nd floor, and then follow the pdxruby signs.

PRESENTATIONS

1. “Ruby Persistence with CouchDB”, Jesse Hallett

There are several libraries out there that provide high level interfaces between Ruby and CouchDB. I will give an overview of some of them, discuss the pros and cons of each, and show how these libraries make working with CouchDB easier. Along the way I will talk about the particular types of problems that CouchDB is good at solving.

Jesse Hallett has been designing web applications with Ruby for nearly three years now. He has worked on administrative / record-keeping applications, CMS and Ecommerce platforms, and various other pieces of software. He spends as much time as possible with his fellow geeks in organizations like the Portland Ruby Brigade and the Portland JavaScript Admirers. Jesse has developed a strong interest in the evolving state-of-the-art of client-side JavaScript technology and next generation databases. Jesse is currently developing JavaScript technology at Jive Software.

2. “Testing iPhone apps with Ruby and Cucumber”, Ian Dees

This talk begins with a survey of the landscape of iPhone UI testing. In particular, we’ll discuss the groundbreaking work done by Matt Gallagher in stimulating and spidering the iPhone UI with an XPath test script. That will be a natural jumping-off point to explain why a full-fledged “GUI driver” for iPhone apps has been long in coming. We’ll look at different ways to prod at application code, and discuss the tradeoffs. Finally, I’ll introduce a simple library of Ruby glue code to connect Cucumber test scripts to the iPhone. The technique will be very basic, but just powerful enough to test a simple iPhone app.

Ian Dees saw his first Timex Sinclair 1000 over 20 years ago, and was instantly hooked. Since then, he’s debugged embedded assembly code using an oscilloscope, written desktop apps in C++, and joyfully employed scripting languages to make testing less painful. Ian currently writes GUI code for handheld instruments as a Software Engineer at Tektronix. Ian is the author of the book Scripted GUI Testing With Ruby <http://pragprog.com/titles/idgtr>.

3. “Ruby, Parser Generators, and External DSLs”, Luke Kanies

Using Puppet’s Parser as an example, we’ll talk about using Parser Generators like YACC and ANTLR to create complete external DSLs – why you would, why you wouldn’t, and what’s different about them. We’ll even delve into some of the more complicated bits like abstract syntax trees.

Luke Kanies has been publishing and speaking on his work in Unix administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products like Cfengine. He founded Reductive Labs in 2005 as a response to the stagnation in sysadmin tools, to be a vehicle for changing the way we interact with and manage our computers. He founded and is the project lead for Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your terms. He has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.


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