These legacy presentations cover a variety of Technical Topics. They have been delivered in a wide range of settings, including educational “brown bag” lunches, lightning talks, user groups, library webinars and technical conferences.
A Tour of Ruby on Rails
Since its public unveiling in 2004, Ruby on Rails has taken the web development world by storm. Rails is an open-source framework, built using the Ruby programming language, that promotes high productivity and reduced development times for real-world web sites. This talk provides a high-level tour of the features of Ruby on Rails. It also shows how this technology is being leveraged to create on-line businesses and web sites. You don’t have to be a programmer to learn how Ruby on Rails can power your on-line business.
Creating a RESTful Web Services API
Companies like Amazon, Google and Yahoo have published web services APIs that empower developers to create mash-ups, add-ons and full-scale applications. The creation of such APIs, however, is not exclusively the domain of large, multi-national corporations. Learn how to architect, build and field a well-designed and scalable RESTful web services API that will allow your business to leverage the capabilities of the developer community. This presentation includes real-life examples from the Grab Networks RESTful API, which provides access to information about the hundreds of thousands of news videos available through Grab Networks’ distribution network.Creating Custom Charts using Ruby Vector Graphics in Rails RVG is a drawing API modeled after the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard. RVG is bundled with RMagick, which is a Ruby interface to the ImageMagick library. Learn how to use RVG to create custom charts that can be integrated directly into web sites. The presentation provides a general introduction to RVG, then illustrates the use of RVG in a web application that displays nearby stars in a generated perspective diagram.
Creating Dynamic Charts With JFreeChart This presentation describes how to use JFreeChart, a Java open source charting library, to dynamically create charts and seamlessly embed them within web pages.
Implementing OpenID for Your Social Networking Web Site There are thousands of social networking sites, each with their own unique sign-on systems. How many user names and passwords do you really want to remember? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a single sign-on that you could use on all of the sites that you frequent? OpenID is an open-source, decentralized sign-on technology that promises this and more. Find out how to implement OpenID for a web site using Ruby on Rails.
Introduction to Ruby on Rails This presentation provides a thorough introduction to Ruby on Rails and is particularly useful for individuals who are completely unfamiliar with Rails.
Killer Business Models You’ve created some really great software, but is it sufficient to form the basis of a viable business? What’s your business model? How can you describe your business model and effectively communicate your vision to others? How can other people evaluate your business model and determine whether your vision and business strategies have merit? This talk provides a conceptual basis for defining, documenting and evaluating business models. It uses real-world examples to show how these concepts can be effectively applied to build actual businesses.
Leveraging Rails to Build Facebook Apps This presentation is a distillation of practical tactics that have been used to create highly successful FaceBook applications using Rails, including real-life systems like PollCast, Iran Voices and Votridea. FaceBook is the world’s largest social network, with over 600 million members.
Maven: Managing Software Projects for Repeatable Results This presentation explores the features of Maven 2, a software build tool that has achieved prominence in the Java development arena. Find out how Maven can be leveraged to automate key project tasks.
Practical JRuby This talk provides a number of step-by-step examples that illustrate different ways in which Rails applications can interact effectively with third-party Java libraries. The presentation shows how developers can leverage JRuby to augment Rails applications with the mature, third-party libraries that are widely available in the Java world.
Rails and the Apache SOLR Search Engine What good is content if nobody can find it? Many information sites are like icebergs, with only a limited amount of content directly accessible to users and the rest, the “underwater” portion, only available through searches. This talk shows how Rails web sites can take advantage of the world-class Apache SOLR search engine to provide sophisticated and customizable search features. We’ll cover how to get started with SOLR, integrating with SOLR using the Sunspot gem, indexing, hit highlighting and other topics.
Rails Security So, you think your web application is reasonably secure? Well, based on the statistics, you’re probably wrong. This talk examines real-world security problems in Rails applications, and shows how they can be mediated.
Rails Tips and Best Practices Rails is a great Ruby-based framework for producing web sites quickly and effectively. Here are a bunch of tips and best practices aimed at the Ruby newbie.
Social Networking: The Next Weapon Against Bad Actors The bad guys are getting more sophisticated with viruses, worms, phasing attacks, spam, etc. We need new ways to unite cyber security professionals so they can work more effectively against bad actors. This talk discusses how social networking techniques can be leveraged to increase the effectiveness of the cyber security community.
Using Rails to Create an Enterprise App: A Real-Life Case Study Rails is a great framework for quickly creating “green field” web applications. Find out how well it works when creating internal, corporate web applications that have to access multiple legacy databases.
Elevator Up, Please! Space travel is dangerous and expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Find out about an alternative way to reach orbit that is rapidly becoming feasible and may eventually change how we view our world.
The Apple Falls Down: Perspectives on Global Warming Global warming is the type of problem that starts out small but becomes increasingly serious as time goes on. While there may be no “smoking gun” right now, we need to prepare for the future. https://web.archive.org/web/20170119075050/http://www.keenertech.com/presentations/the-apple-falls-down-perspectives-on-global-warming/video
Quick Start Presentations are short, highly focused presentations designed to quickly familiarize viewers with a single topic. These presentations are ideal for time slots of 10 to 15 minutes. They have been successfully used as: 1) planned interstitial content within longer events, 2) lightning talks, 3) brief introductions to a particular topic.
Quick Start: ActiveScaffold ActiveScaffold is more than just a replacement for the default scaffold functionality built into the Rails framework. The ActiveScaffold plugin provides a simple way for developers to quickly and easily add sophisticated data maintenance and data display features to web sites.
Quick Start: Rails This presentation provides a brief, non-technical overview of Ruby on Rails, suitable for both management and technical professionals. For an audience of Rails “newbies”, the focus of the presentation is just on educating viewers about Rails. For a more experienced audience, the spin is typically on how the audience can effectively educate others about Rails as a technology.
Quick Start: Rails LiveTree This presentation provides a step-by-step roadmap for creating a dynamic tree feature for a web site using the LiveTree JavaScript code and the Rails “acts_as_tree” mechanism.
