As previously announced, E-xact is proud to sponsor the Vancouver Ruby/Rails Meetup Group.

This evening the group will convene at E-xact’s headquarters in Yaletown for their October meeting. The speakers’ presentations will be liveblogged below, simply refresh this page throughout the evening to keep up to speed on all the event’s happenings.

Introduction:

There will be two 20-30 minute presentations for the October Meetup

• 1. A Returned Merchandise Authorization System - Dave Dumaresq
• 2. Introduction to JRuby - Teera Kanokkanjanarat

Live Blog Begins at 7:00pm PST on October 9, 2007

WIFI is available via E-xact’s contribution to FreeTheNet.ca. To read more about the Free The Net initiative in downtown Vancouver, visit Vancouver.FreeTheNet.ca or view the Flickr map.

7:05pm: The first presenter is Dave Dumaresq, speaking about an RMA System (Returned Merchandise Authorization System). Here is a bit of background from the Meetup site:

Last year Dave and a friend wrote a Rails application that manages returned merchandise authorization (for tracking products that are returned to manufacturer for repair). The application uses a tabbed layout and work queues to provide a work-flow user interface which allows authorized users to create new RMAs, receive units for repair, log repair work and create packing slips for shipment back to the customer. Work Queues and Wizard work flows are implemented using RJS for snappy Ajaxian views.

7:15pm: Dave’s reporting on the modules of his RMA system, and various features. The room is open to comment and ask questions, in fact it’s encouraged.

7:30pm: The second presentation of the evening is by Teera, speaking about JRuby.

7:40pm: To begin, a brief intro to JRuby. It’s basically a Java implementation of Ruby interpreter with full support from Sun. It provides an alternative implementation, Ruby + JVM. It’s currently in JRuby 1.0.1 release and is compatible with Ruby 1.8.5, most pure Ruby code works (IRB, Gems, Rake).

7:45pm: Why use JRuby? It incorporates Ruby code from the Java side, it has native unicode support, it has excellent performance, and it’s making the way to enterprise. Is it a passing phase/buzz word or something worthwhile and worth introducing to developers?

8:05pm: After a quick demo more questions arise. “Mixing multiple languages in the same piece of source code - just doesn’t seem as evil anymore.” Most do see this as the wave of the future, as a way to simplify and speed up processes for web 2.0. On the other hand, many have rejected JRuby in the past in favour of other code bases and share their own stories about implementations, and performance.

Note the poll at the bottom of the page. If you already have had an introduction to JRuby (or not), how likely are you to use it?

[Poll=2]

For more information about Vancouver Ruby/Rails uses visit the Ruby Central blog, or the Meetup.com account.

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