Last night was the first gathering of the Edmonton Ruby Meetup. The purpose of these meetups is to build and spotlight the Ruby community in the Edmonton area, and to share our experiences with Ruby, Rails and software development in general. Anyone interested is welcome to attend and speak. If you’re not already you should start following us on Twitter at @yegrb for announcements and news.
Nexopia kindly donate space and Internet, and the turnout was good. We ended up all fitting into one board room so it was a good opportunity to meet other Ruby enthusiasts face-to-face.
Last night I gave a talk on how to use Ruby with Riak. I used @seancribbs excellent Ripple gem to get them playing nicely together. The talk is embedded after the jump…
To start, thank-you to everyone that has taken part in our survey. We’ve had a great response, and appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions. Your responses are key in figuring out the details and audience of our meetups. And now the results…
When we look at the responses it’s clear that most people are interested in meeting once a month for lighting talks and informal hacking sessions, starting sometime in the next month. There is also some interest in longer more formal talks and tutorials, so they’ll probably have a place in our meetups at some point too.
Based on these results we’re shooting to start meetings by the end of February and will have more details once a date and time are confirmed. If you haven’t had a chance to answer the survey polling is still open. Have your say at http://edmontonrb.org.
For the statistically inclined keep reading for all the results. (These charts will update in real time.)
What format would you like to see the gatherings take on?
As you may know, I’m going to be doing a race called the City to Surf this August. It’s 14km and I’ve convinced myself doing it won’t kill me (though it may shave a few years off!) The race is setup so you can choose a charity to support, and I’ve selected the RSPCA.
As long-distance doggy daddies we’ve both been thinking a lot about the welfare of our pet, and know that he’s been well taken care of. We also know that not all pets are as lucky as Bruno. The RSPCA helps thousands of animals in need every year, and we thought supporting it would be a great way to honour Bruno while we’re away.
If you’re interested in sponsoring me I’ve got a page setup at:
In this post we’ll digress a bit and write a command-line tool to monitor and explore the information Zeroconf broadcasts on your network. This will give us some background for the next post when we modify our web server to list other servers of a similar kind running on your network. If you’re already familiar with how to browse and retrieve information about Zeroconf services using DNSSD then you may want to skip ahead. Read more…
The first big news is that phpunit_setup.inc is now part of a new project called Drupal_TDD. To quote our README file the project is,
“…designed to make Test Driven Development with Drupal easy and enjoyable.”
As part of this change the source code for phpunit_setup.inc has moved to GitHub. This will allow us to collaborate more easily on phpunit_setup.inc in the future, and should make it easier for any readers hoping to give test driven development with Drupal a try.
Check out the project page for news and updates, or to download the latest version of phpunit_setup.inc. You can also visit the Drupal TDD wiki for documentation and examples.
Good-bye Backports, Hello Automated Version Detection
In other news, I’ve also been busy refactoring code to integrate some thoughts and feedback I’ve received. The main changes are:
Using phpunit_setup.inc in Drupal 5 now works just like using it on Drupal 6. You no longer need to include drupal6_backports.inc in your unit test files. The same steps Pat outlines on his blog to use phpunit_setup.inc in Drupal 6 will now work with Drupal 5. This also means you won’t need to change your tests when migrating between versions.
When running under Drupal 5 phpunit_setup.inc now creates the same database schema as running a fresh Drupal 5 install. Rather than backporting the Drupal 6 installation process to Drupal 5 which created tables you wouldn’t normally use in a Drupal 5 installation, phpunit_setup.inc now automatically detects the version of Drupal you’re using and runs the appropriate database installation procedure.
There are still more announcements on the way, but that’s all we can reveal right now. Stay tuned for further developments!
UPDATE: Since this post was written phpunit_setup.inc has been moved into the Drupal TDD project. phpunit_setup.inc has also been updated to not require the drupal6_backports.inc file. Read my post on the changes for the details.
A few days ago I made a post about 
