Monday, April 27, 2009

On Saturday I gave an "Introduction to SproutCore" talk at JSConf, the world's first all-JavaScript conference.  It was a great conference and highly recommended.  Videos will be posted over the next several weeks.  For now, for those interested, my slides are below. 

Friday, April 17, 2009

My tutorial at RailsConf 2009

I'm teaching a three-hour tutorial at RailsConf 2009 on SproutCore and Rails, called "Building Next Generation Web Apps with Rails and SproutCore".  Since three hours isn't a whole lot of time, I wanted to post some things that students can do to prepare to get the most out of the training.

See you in Las Vegas!

Prerequisites

We'll use the stable release of SproutCore (0.9.23) although I plan to address what's different about the 1.0 API which is currently in alpha testing.  So to be able to work in the tutorial, you'll need recent versions of Ruby and RubyGems.  Follow these directions to install SproutCore.

Note that the SproutCore gem depends on merb-core (>= 0.9.9), erubis, rubigen, and mongrel.

Before the tutorial starts, you must be able to view localhost:4020.  If that works, you know everything installed correctly.

This may go without saying, but you also need to have Rails 2.3.x installed.  Specifically you should be able to load the Rails startup page on your development machine at http://localhost:3000/.

Recommended Reading

I strongly recommend you complete the "Hello World" tutorial on the SproutCore home page. You may also want to browse the project wiki to get more of a sense of the framework.

The most helpful wiki articles to read include: