Panmind spin-offs presented at Ruby Social Club Milan
On July 22nd 2010, Mikamai hosted a Ruby Social Club in Milan, where nearly 50 people attended watching five speeches about Ruby, Web development and Startups. I was glad to be one of the speakers, and I presented a set of Rails plugins we spinned off from our latest (and greatest) project: Panmind (read more on the about page) and released as Open Source on GitHub.
The keynote is split in two parts: the first one explains why you should follow the sane software engineering principle of writing modular and interest-separated code and then how you could (and should) extract it from your Rails application by decoupling configuration and then prepare for the Open Source release, by writing documentation AND presenting to a Ruby event so, hopefully, someone else will write unit tests! :-)
We released an SSL helper plugin that
implements filters (like Rails’ ssl_requirement) but also named route helpers:
no more <%= url_for :protocol => 'https' %>! You’ll have something like
plain_root_url and ssl_login_url - like they were built into the framework.
Then, a Google Analytics ultra-simple
plugin, with <noscript> support, a couple of test helpers and an
embryo
of a JS Analytics framework - hopefully it’ll evolve into a complete jQuery
plugin. Then, a ReCaptcha interface,
with AJAX validation support and eventually a
Zendesk interface for Rails.
We released also more code on Panmind’s GitHub account, including the nifty AJAX Navigation Framework that implements all the boilerplate code for the ultra-fast AJAX navigation of panmind contents and projects.
The keynote follows, you can download it in PDF (no exploits, I swear!) from this link or view/comment it on slideshare here.
Final words: check out mikamai blog post on the Ruby Social Club to read the other keynotes (I will, hopefully, update this post with sum-ups of them when time permits :-)) and say hello on twitter or on GitHub if you’re interested in contributing our open source projects or you want to work with us.