Last night was the second edition of Montreal On Rails, with 50% more stuff! (3 presentations instead of 2) My thoughts on the presentation:

First up was Chris Scott, who presented the extjs Javascript framework. Notes to future presenters: please make sure you take 15 seconds to explain what the framework is and why I should care at the start. Don’t wait 5 minutes where you’re setting up your example to finally drop a ‘btw, extjs is a widget framework’. The presentation started slowly with basic stuff and moved on to bigger and better things at the end. I was really impressed by the layout management possibilities that extjs offers.

There was a lively discussion after the presentation comparing extjs to Protoype. Someone pointed out the obvious that prototype isn’t a widget library, but extjs seems to also cover a lot of what the prototype/scriptaculous combo can do.

I’m not a fan of javascript widgets library. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to want to emulate all desktop application functionalities in a web application. Working with the constraints of the web browser forces you to look for simpler alternatives.

Second presentation was by Chris Lamothe who did a demo on how to add user authentication to your rails application using acts_as_authenticated. It was geared toward newbies. He also briefly mentioned a plugin I didn’t know about, role_requirement, that adds basic role based security to acts_as_authenticated.

“Client-side debugging in Firefox” was the title of the last presentation, by Terje Tjervaag. Actually, he quickly presented a couple of Firefox plugin like Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug and YSlow. If you don’t know about these plugins, download them now! There’s no way I’m going back to using Firefox without Firebug (except for the increased slowness and memory usage). It allows you to poke at and modify anything in your web page, live. Terje seems really knowledgeable about testing the view/javascript/browser issues of an application and I hope he can do a more advanced presentation someday explaining how he does it. Right now, my automated testing stops at the models and controllers.

Suggestions for next presenters: although it’s nice to show live how to do things, you don’t have to type everything in front of the audience, especially when we can see the complete examples commented just below what you’re typing. It’s OK to copy paste. You can also have a basic rails application already setup with what you need. This would help speed up presentations next time.

I hope I don’t sound too critical of the speakers. They did a really good job and I realize that speaking in front of people is not easy. I wouldn’t have done better myself.

The best part of the night was after the meeting, as we went to McClean’s for burger and beer. I had an awesome discussion with Marc-André Cournoyer (read his report), Carl Mercier and Francois Beausoleil (who will be doing a presentation on piston next time). We exchanged war stories and talked about every subject concerning rails from deployment to testing to plugins we use. I hope we can do the same next time!

Note: The next meeting will apparently be at the StandoutJobs office. I bet this is just a ploy by Fred to make sure every rails programmers in Montreal wants to work for them. ;)