James Adam, Lead, Rails Engines

Dr. James Adam has been an active member of the Ruby community for more than four years, contributing to a number of projects including the FXRuby GUI toolkit and the Ruby-OpenGL bindings. He is a Rails early-adopter and contributor, working with the plugin system since its first appearance in Edge Rails. He has spoken at both conferences and user groups about using Rails plugins for effective team development.

James is the developer behind the Engines plugin, and works as part of a small internal develop- ment team in London producing real-world Rails applications within a corporate environment. He also helps run the London Ruby User Group, spreading the word about his favorite programming language to anyone who will listen.

Presentation: "Extending Rails with Plugins"

Track: What makes Ruby Roll?

Time: Friday 09:45 - 10:45

Location: Elizabeth Windsor

Abstract:

One of the most important and useful aspects of the Rails framework is it's ability to be extended using plugins. Thanks to the flexibility and power of Ruby, almost any aspect of Rails can be altered to suit the needs of a particular application.

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 with practical examples.

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.

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