Chicago.pm - Catalyst + Ruby on Rails October 18, 2005

Please join the Chicago Perl Mongers for an exciting look at two MVC
web application frameworks.

First, Jason Gessner will present an introduction and a couple of
practical examples of Catalyst.

Catalyst is an up and coming addition to the LAMP stack, an Elegant
Web Framework, supporting the MVC pattern, as well as a number of
experimental web patterns. It's heavily inspired by such frameworks
as Ruby On Rails, Maypole, and Spring.
Catalyst allows you to choose your favorite template language for the
View, and choose your favorite data access tool for the Model
portion. Catalyst also provides a powerful plugin system with dozens
of available plugins to simplify coding tasks.
The presentation will give a quick introduction to the framework and
then provide a couple of real world examples of Catalyst interacting
with Mason and Template Toolkit applications.

The second part of the evening will be John W. Long of the Chicago
Ruby Users Group giving an introduction to Ruby On Rails.

GET TO THE POINT! WEB DEVELOPMENT WITH RUBY AND RAILS

Since its release just one year ago, Ruby on Rails has been building
steam. Web developers begin casually experimenting with Rails and
soon
find themselves creating web applications with more power and less
code than they'd ever thought possible.

Rails incorporates and dramatically simplifies many web development
patterns and best practices, yet much of the reason for the
success of
Rails lies in the Ruby language itself. In this next presentation,
we?ll explore the many facets of this elegant and powerful language
from Japan and what it may hold for the future of computing. We?ll
also take a bird?s eye view of the Rails framework and examine
insights of the systems that make up Rails.

If you are interested in attending the meeting, please RSVP to
jason@multiply.org by the morning of the meeting.
Because the meeting is after normal business hours, an RSVP is
required, as well as a photo ID.

About the Speakers

Jason Gessner has been programming in perl for over 6 years, and has
been active in the local user groups for the last 3 years. He is
the lead
Search Developer at Performics, a leading Search Engine Marketing
company.
He is interested in catalyst and Rails primarily to stop doing boring
web
coding tasks and get more interesting work done.

John W. Long has been an advocate of the Ruby programming language
since co-founding the Chicago Area Ruby Group in the fall of
2003. He
has three years of experience with the Ruby programming language,
coming to the scene well before Ruby on Rails was even an option. He
is responsible for several Web applications (some written in Rails
and
some not) where he works as a Web developer for the Institute in
Basic
Life Principles, a non-profit organization based out of Oak
Brook. As
a member of the Ruby Visual Identity Team, he is hard at work
participating in an upcoming redesign of ruby-lang.org.