Peerglobe Technology Inc.

We had our second AIR, Flex and Ruby On Rails get together this week on Wednesday. About 20 people from different technology backgrounds attended the event. The event was very informative and surprisingly provided a warm and friendly networking environment.

Our first speaker was Peter Armstrong the co-founder of Ruboss Corporation and co-creator of Ruboss Framework. Ruboss Framework is a Ruby on Rails plug-in that allows smooth integration of a Flex application with a Ruby on Rails RESTful framework.

What’s REST ?

REST is a software architecture design that describes objects as resources identified by unique URIs whose state can be altered by different actions expressed as verbs. For example lets consider a printer on the network as an object and the unique URI that identifies the printer is, for example, /printer/1 . The state of the printer can be altered by issuing different commands to the printer  through its URI. We can ask the printer to print something by saying PRINT ‘x’ /printer/1 or ask the printer to reset itself by saying RESET /printer/1. This method of applying different verbs to a single unique URI to accomplish different results is the principal of the REST design.

On the Web, Resources are described by URLs and the actions that can be applied to these resources are defined as GET, POST, DELETE and PUT. Since the current web browsers  only implement two of these actions POST and GET, in order to fully implement the REST design, the back-end framework must handle all four verbs and the mapping of URL to the resources themselves. In Rails 1.x a plug-in called Simply RESTful would extend the framework by handling all four verbs using the “_method” parameter and  mapping controllers to the resources in the Route Class. In Rails 2.0 this feature is part of the framework core.

In order to benefit from the REST design within the Flex Application, Ruboss framework creates a service layer between the flex objects and web services that binds a flex object to a remote resource and provides ability to perform REST actions on the object without manually hand-coding resource’s URI and the “_method” parameter.  You can learn more about Ruboss framework at http://code.google.com/p/ruboss/.

After a short break Gerald Bauer presented his latest creation, S9 slide show, a free web alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote in Ruby. It’s a simple ruby program that turns text written in wiki style into HTML slide pages.  This is a great tool to turn a collaboratly witten wiki into a slide show.  You can download and try S9 at http://slideshow.rubyforge.org/tutorial.html or check out Gerald’s blog.

I’ve posted the event photos at facebook and flickr. Be sure to check them out. Thanks to everyone who attended the event and for those who couldn’t make it for this one we’ll be having more events later on.