Envy Labs

Railsconf 2010 is June 7th-10th in Baltimore, Maryland and almost all of the Envy Labs development team will be in attendance.  On the first day of the conference our team will be teaching a 3 hour Rails 3 Ropes Course Tutorial, and our friend Jeremy McAnally will be doing a Rails 3 Deep Dive Tutorial.

A few people were concerned about the differences between these two Rails 3 tutorials, so I got together with Jeremy and made sure there was no overlapping content.  While the Ropes course focuses more on the basics of the external API (the common front-end code), Jeremy’s talk focuses more on the internal API (the back-end code).  See below for more details:

Rails 3 Ropes Course

The Envy Labs team will be running this 3 hour course in a workshop format, containing 5 sections with ~10 minutes of instructional slides followed by 20 minutes of a code challenge where you’ll get your hands dirty programming a Rails 3 application.  In each code challenge you’ll have a set number of tasks to accomplish (and tests to make pass), along with extra credit tasks for the over achievers.  Here are the different topics we’ll be covering, and what you’ll be coding.

1. Getting Started and Routes – New script commands, configuration changes, and the new routing syntax.

2. Bundler and ActionController – The new Responds with syntax, and why and how of bundler.

3. Learning the new Mailer – The new syntax improvements in ActionMailer.

4. ActiveRelation & ActiveModel – The differences between Rails 2 and Rails 3 queries using arel, and using ActiveModel to construct non-database models.

5. XSS & UJS – How Rails 3 changed to combat cross-site scripting (XSS) and how it encourages unobtrusive javascript (UJS) through the use of HTML5 data-tags.

With a break in the middle and time for questions that’ll just about cover it.  By the end of the tutorial you’ll have built a Rails 3 application leveraging all the newest external APIs that just about everyone will be using to build Rails apps.  If you’d like to learn about the new Rails 3 internal APIs , that’s where Jeremy’s tutorial comes in.

The Rails 3 Deep Dive

The Rails 3 Deep Dive will also be a lab-driven workshop format.  The content will be cut into bite-sized chunks, each with an accompanying lab exercise to really flex those new Rails 3 chops.  In general, we’ll focus on 4 areas:

1. Rack and Rails 3 – We’ve heard a lot about Rack and Rails 3, but how is its role different now?  How deep does it integrate?  How can I get it working for me?  We’ll answer these questions and more as we look at the plethora of ways Rack can make your app faster and easier to develop.

2. Building plugins the right way – The plugin API is a lot different in Rails 3 (so much so that many popular plugins simply don’t work yet!).  We’ll spend a lot of time looking at building Railties, tying into Active Record, generating files with the new Rails generators, and more.

3. Abusing modularity – In this module (ha ha!), we’ll look at how to exploit Rails new modularity in fun and interesting ways.  We’ll build a new router, build an app without a single real controller, and other fun things that while seemingly just hacks, can actually be really useful in the right contexts.

4. What you can learn about Ruby from Rails 3 – We’ll take a tour through some Ruby techniques used inside of Rails 3 that you can either (a) jack to use in your own applications or (b) pick up some really great ideas from.

We’ll take a break after each module to decompress, compare notes, and, of course, eat some snacks.

Related posts:

1. Upcoming Conferences
2. What’s new in Rails 3.0 Beta 2
3. Getting Started with the Rails 3 BugMash