Web414 - Milwaukee's Web Community

We had a few new people this meeting and it was nice to see some people who haven't been in a while.

After finally locating a room with a projector (thanks, Jeramey!), we started the meeting around 7:30.

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iStockPhoto - Mike Rohde

Mike talked about iStockPhoto, an stock photography site that allows you to both buy and sell images for web, print, and other uses. Some of the highlights of the site include the mockup feature, which allows you to hold on to the images for mockups before purchasing; the lightbox feature allows you to pull together images into a folder that is public to be able to show clients a theme or to have them choose images to use; the payment goes by credits wherein you purchases credits for a little over $1 for the smallest resolution; you can purchase not only images, but vector artwork, video clips, and images with clipping paths.

We discussed the cons of the service as well - Pete mentioned that he was looking for some images on there earlier in the week and that it was kind of hit and miss - the bad thing is that if it isn't a popular topic for the photographers, you can't really get much out of the service. He was looking for images of downtown Milwaukee and couldn't find much. He mentioned that he searched around on flickr and came across a lot of Jeramey's images that he ended up requesting some rights for.

Jeramey also talked about other stock exchange sites and the pros and cons of those. Including free sites not having good rights management or good editing.

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Ruby on Rails¹ - Tim Bailen

Tim uses a Windows package called "Instant Rails" and uses RadRails (an eclipse IDE) for development. He noted that the nice thing about RoR is that you already have a framework - it is easy to make something "out of the box" without having to do a ton of background work and can be used to create a lot of flexible apps. Rails is an interpreted language, so you can write a line of code and see its effect right away (without a long compile/deploy cycle). It is dynamic in that you can put it into a static document and still have it easily updatable - for example adding a price for parts and being able to update all the prices at once without updating the HTML file itself.

Tim put together a basic "Hello World!" document with 5 lines of code and a simple HTML file. All said and done it took less than 100 characters. He gave us a few examples of the syntax, including how to display the time in one hour which was very legible.

He talked about the separation of HTML/XHTML code and programmatic code for the same reason that one would separate CSS from XHTML - for one it is prettier and easier to read and secondly separating out function from function.

After the initial simple program, he created a more involved one for bookshelf management - a tool used to enter books onto a "bookshelf" and allow them to be "picked" by the user on the front end and added to a cart. One of the nice things about RoR is that it gives you a programmatic view of your database. Within a few minutes and one line of code, he had an easy interface to manage items in the database.

^{1 - Agile Web Development with Rails - Dave Thomas}