Talks

Ruby on Rails Extreme Crash Course

A talk I have given in December 2007 to convert 9elements to Ruby on Rails. Intended to present the basics of Ruby and Rails in about 3 hours.
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Git

An introductory talk on Git given at Barcamp Ruhr 2 in March 2009 (German only).
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Metaprogramming Ruby

Talk given at Railscamp Germany 3 in Münster in 2010 about the mechanics behind Ruby’s metaprogramming capabilities (German only).
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Articles and Texts

Some longer articles I have written in places other than this website.

Getting started with Ruby on Rails

An article I wrote for Smashing Magazine in March 2009, outlining the basic ideas behind Ruby and Rails, intended to provide enough orientation for interested programmers to educate themselves.
BlogpostPart 1Part 2

A Thin Web Application Framework based on Server-side JavaScript

My CS diploma thesis, written in 2009. It describes an architecture for a web application framework based on proven principles of the web and provides a sample implementation in server-side JavaScript. I wrote it just as the ServerJS/CommonJS working group started. These guys have been steadily marching forward since and made tremendous progress, so the code is horribly outdated.
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Open Source

You can find all of my open source code at http://github.com/janv/.

REST in Place

REST in Place is an AJAX Inplace-Editor that talks to RESTful controllers. It requires absolutely no additional server-side code if your controller fulfills the following REST preconditions:

  • It uses the HTTP PUT method to update a record
  • It delivers an object in JSON form for requests with “Accept: application/json” headers

The editor works by PUTting the updated value to the server and GETting the updated record afterwards to display the updated value. That way any authentication methods or otherwise funky workflows in your controllers are used for the inplace-editors requests.

This is my most popular and successful project. It has its own page on this site which you can use to send comments or questions.

» Github repository

DBSerialize

Dbserialize provides two rake tasks to store your current environments database tables to Yaml fixtures in db/fixtures and to fill the database with these fixtures.

That way it’s possible to store sample data consistently in the repository and for all developers on a project to use common sample data instead of manually generating something on every developer machine or sending database dumps around via email.

» Github repository

Pavel

Pavel (Paretoset Analysis Visualization and Evaluation) is a tool for interactively displaying and evaluating large sets of highdimensional data. Its main intended use is the analysis of result sets from multi-objective evolutionary algorithms applied to machining problems but it can basically work with any kind of multidimensional data.

The project was developed as a student research project at Dortmund University since in October 2006. When the project was nearing its end at year later, the software was released as open source..

» Project homepage at Google Code

Dummymail

A dummy mailserver implemented in Ruby, running on the commandline. It just spits out whatever it receives. I used it a while back for testing PHP apps that send mails via SMTP. Haven’t really touched it in the last years.

» dummymail.rb