August Meeting - Rails in the Cloud with Heroku

Topic: Rails in the cloud with Heroku

Heroku is probably the coolest and most developer-friendly cloud vendor yet. Heroku is a cloud platform for hosting Ruby applications, but with a twist. Heroku supports standard OSS tools for your entire development stack and deployment stack and a free entry-level of service. Learn how I was able to quickly and easily build and deploy a Sinatra and Rails application to host the ChicagoCodeCamp.comsite and my new breakable toy, twatio.com.

We'll also take a look at MongoHQ, the cloud-based Mongo server. Which provides cloud-based Mongo storage and a free entry-level account.

Speaker: Mike Hall

Mike is an aspiring Software Craftsman, the founder of the McHenry Cloud Developer's Group, creator and co-host of the new IronLanguages.net Podcast and co-organizer with ChicagoCodeCamp. Mike has been diving headfirst into the world of Ruby, Python and dynamic languages over the past several months after years of membership in the Alt.NET community. He's currently consulting with Obtiva Corporation and is the developer-owner of just3ws, llc.

http://twitter.com/just3ws

Venue: Duke's Alehouse

We're happy to be hosting our third meeting at Duke's Alehouse. http://thedukeabides.com Duke's is a great local pub and kitchen, a personal favorite lunch and dinner spot for my family as well as a great place to kickback with a microbrew at the bar. My recommendation, the Black'n'Bleu burger withWeihenstephaner Weissbier.

Additional Information:

The event kicks off at 6:30 and we typically begin the presentation around 7:00. The presentation can last up to an hour and we have the room until 8:30. After then we can move the conversation to the Duke's bar downstairs.

We're also looking for sponsors to help offset costs and grow the group with advertising and growth. Please contact Mike Hall mdh@clouddevelopersgroup.com if you are interested in sponsorship.

 

July Meeting - Explore Node.js

Cloud Developer's Group Meeting July 2010

This month software craftsman Jim Suchy from 8th Light will be presenting on Node.js and how it can be used with the Heroku cloud host.

If you live in or near McHenry County, Illinois then I'd like to invite you out to our July meeting. Come find out what is behind all of the hype surrounding Node.js.  Node is described as "evented I/O for V8 JavaScript."  We will discuss what this means, how it differs from traditional network servers, and we will demonstrate how to easily solve some problems that are difficult in most popular server-side programming frameworks. 

Node.js http://nodejs.org

Heroku http://heroku.com

Jim Suchy is a Software Craftsman with 8th Light. http://blog.8thlight.com/jim

We've also been busy coordinating with the folks at Duke's Alehouse in Crystal Lake to host our meetings. Come on out for the content, but stay for the excellent beer and local grass-fed, farm-raised beef hamburgers! http://thedukeabides.com

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Our meeting was a great success. Jim presented on node.js and blew us all away at just how easy node is to develop for and how unbelievably fast the server is.

Code for the presentation can be found on Jim's GitHub repo http://github.com/jsuchy/nodejs_mchenry_cloud

 

June Meeting - Getting Groovy on the Google App Engine

We've pretty well established that Google App Engine is the place to be no matter what language you are interested in developing with.

This month we will learn how to use Groovy, a language built on the JVM that might be considered Java++. It adds nicer syntax, closures and various upgrades to the standard Java language. Bill Gloff, co-founder of the Chicago Groovy User Group (http://cgug.org/) will walk us through how to setup and leverage this language in our Google App Engine applications.

NEW LOCATION!

Our June meeting will move to Duke's Alehouse & Kitchen! Located across the street from the Metra station in downtown Crystal Lake, come out to the meeting and join us for a beer or two, and maybe even try the local farm-raised burgers. More info at http://www.thedukeabides.com/ and on Twitter at @DukesAlehouse.

Register at http://groovyappengine.eventbrite.com/