Photos from Austin on Rails Apr 23, 2013

Just in case you wanted to know what the Austin on Rails group looks like in an IPhone panorama shot: 70 people listened as Matt Swain talked about Amazon's cloud solution and how to use Elastic Beanstalk, the Amazon tool for configuring virtual servers. (It took me way too long to get the Jack and The Beanstalk/Cloud connection).


 

Mike Myers from HomeAway gave a good overview of using a JRuby/Rails front end with a Java backend.

I talked with Jeff Hennigan, the main recruiter at KForce, before the meeting and he said a few interesting things: The Ruby job market is hot. Java and .Net are still good. This new generation of Ruby programmers is different than the Java/.Net crowd. Some of the startups use social media to communicate and don't even have a phone number.


My random jumble of notes:
AWS comes with Route53 for DNS and Cloudfront for CDN.
"eb" is a
Command Line Interpreter for Elastic Beanstalk; so you can do "eb init", "eb stop". It just abstracts our the
JSON file that really defines an AWS service.
Amazon offers a free virtual server for those wanting to try out the system. 750 hours per month free.
Amazon tunes the kernal in their own version of linux for different sized machines.
JRuby gives real Native Threads, while Ruby only has green threads.

Pictures from Austin .Net Meeting April 8th, 2013

Ryan Vice gave an interesting overview of Web API to 65 software professionals.




My brief jumbled notes:
AustinApi will be having it's first meeting Wednesday, April 24, 2013 for those interested in producing and comsuming web APIs.
The HTTP PUT verb is used for idempotent actions, otherwise use POST. "application/json" is the header for passing JSON.
Fiddler is a great tool to use for testing APIs.
Response.AddHeader("location", "http://example.com/Accounts/4")
The MVC4 model binder can grab values from the url, the body, or the headers.
Microsoft, to their credit, is using the open source JSON.NET serializer. You can customize the variables returned by using a custom ContractResolver. (return "first-choice", or "firstChoice" or "first_choice").
IAPIExplorer can document your APIs similar to a WSDL.
You can download the WebAPI "Help Pages" from nuget.
I liked Ryan's last comment about Web API bringing us closer to the "elusive dream of concentrating on business logic." (Not necessarily because I think Web API will do that for us, but it should be the focus of frameworks to remove all the mundane tasks that slow us down. Perhaps in 40 years we will get there.)