My presentation went pretty well tonight. I think it helped that we had a good attendance and some really good questions.
For your viewing pleasure, here are my presentation slides. Yes, it’s completely web-based (S5 as previously mentioned) and hosted using Radiant.
Thanks to Scotty Moon who taped the presentation. -We’ll have it up on YouTube real soon.-
UPDATE 3/31: Here’s the Google Video of my presentation.
There are always serious conceptual challenges with building a large system, especially when you want to keep the responsibilities of each component clear and with as few side-effects as possible.
There’s one controller action in the not-so-stealth-anymore project (GiftLasso) I’m working on that begins multiple workflows. Naturally, we’ve been using Bruce Williams’ wonderful in_context plugin for most of these issues. The main point of this action is to create (or find) a model — I’ll call it model A — that needs to be present for the subsequent action. Once this first model is created, we redirect to the new action of the next controller so that the user can input some information and then create the associated model (Model B). Our application is CRUD-focused but doesn’t use REST as of yet. In the future, I’d prefer to create model A as we’re creating model B, but the separation works well for now and is conceptually cleaner.
That pattern worked very nicely and cleanly until we wanted to add a little Ajax in the mix.
I plan on giving a presentation to the local Ruby group at the next meeting (March 27 7:00pm CST). The presentation will cover how to develop extensions for RadiantCMS. I’ve developed most of the presentation using OpenOffice Impress, but I recently converted to S5 and I am loving it, especially since I’m a HTML/CSS junkie. The best part of this is I don’t have to worry about what kind of software is on the presentation machine (hopefully they at least have Firefox, but most machines at Centriq Foss do) or whether I can get Liz’s MacBook to play nice with the projector.
Here’s an overview of my presentation:
As soon as I’ve given the presentation, I’ll post it for viewing here on my website.
