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James Adam, Reevoo

 James  Adam

James is a Ruby developer for Reevoo, and has been developing with Ruby since 2001. He is one of the instigators of the London Ruby User Group, and has presented to Ruby developers at conferences in Portland, Vancouver, London, and Santa Clara, where he unleashed the now-legendary "Acts As Hasselhoff" plugin. He has remained in hiding at his home in London ever since.

He's been an active member of the Rails community since its inception, and is the developer behind the Engines plugin. He's also author of the "Rails Plugins" book. He pretends not to have a blog at http://interblah.net.

Presentation: "The Dark Art of Developing Plugin"

Time: Wednesday 14:00 - 15:00

Location: Auditorium 1, 1. floor

Abstract:

Plugins are more than just shiny nuggets of code which rain down from the higher echelons of the Rails pantheon; they are loyal and useful servants that anyone can employ to help reuse code between applications. Without a little guidance, however, the process of figuring out just how to tame these beasts can be overwhelming.

This presentation will help give developers the boost that's often required to get up to speed developing plugins. We'll cover the hooks that Rails' plugin mechanism makes available, and how to put them to best use in practice.

Once we've covered the groundwork, we'll start to look at more advanced programming techniques for sharing code (and other files) between Rails applications. With a few key programming techniques under our belt, we can use plugins to alter and enhance the Rails framework itself, and become masters of Ruby's object model along the way.