

MagicRuby - Free Ruby conference at Walt Disney World - jeremymcanally
http://magic-ruby.com

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jamesbritt
Disappointed that a talk about Ruby desktop development omits Monkeybars. I'm
obviously biased because I'm the project lead, but even still it's way more
robust than, say, Shoes, especially for anything non-trivial.

I've released a commercial application built with it, and was part of a team
that used it to build a seriously complex satellite modem control application.

~~~
petercooper
Is there a new release coming up? (Or anything with a slightly "newsy" angle?)

Given JRuby's explosion in the last couple of years, I'd love to write it up
and/or just link it in Ruby Weekly, but people tend to complain at me when I
link to things that haven't been updated recently/aren't "news." Even a recent
"how to build X" type article/screencast/similar would do.

~~~
jamesbritt
I fixed one or two things recently, so MB is at 1.0.6 I haven't gotten around
to a formal gem release.

At some point I need to get on to making some new screencasts, especially
since a kinda recent change to Monkeybars made it much easier to use inline UI
code for the view class in place of a pre-compiled Java Swing form. So it's
now stupid simple to use use Neurogami::SwingSet (for example) to define your
form and render it.

People doing Ruby GUI comparisons seemed to make a habit of claiming that
Monkeybars required Netbeans, which was never true. Netbeans has, however, a
kick-ass free GUI editor, so you can design arbitrarily complex forms with no
personal Java coding. It also has very nice (J)Ruby integration, so writing
JRuby code in Netbeans works really well. (I tended to edit code in vi and use
Netbeans for compilation of UI stuff.)

However, you could always call Swing straight from Monkeybars. It just wasn't
as nice as it should have been. So I wrote a wrapper around some basic Swing
form/frame/component stuff, hooked it up with MiG layout, taught Monkeybars
how to tell the difference between a pure Java class and Ruby class that
subclasses from Swing, and now we have the best of both worlds. :)

Thing with Monkeybars, though, is there hasn't been much need to add stuff.
It's sort of done. Not terribly sexy, but not every library needs stuff piled
into it. Last few release have mainly been updates in order to handle changes
in JRuby.

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wccrawford
I missed a previous Disney-located programming conference because of a
conflict... But I only found out about that one by accident.

Does anyone know if there's a good list of Orlando-area programming
conferences that is kept up to date?

~~~
abyssknight
Seconded, since I'm in the area as well...

~~~
jseifer
Me too. Not to hijack, but is anyone down for an HN meetup in Orlando?

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jtagen
Interesting - I wonder if the free conference portion is due to the (usually
fabulous) sponsors, or if Disney is getting really desperate for people to
fill their hotels - to the point of offering free conference space.

~~~
jeremymcanally
It's the sponsors. :) Disney definitely makes its money off these conferences
(though it is honestly not nearly as extortionate as one would originally
think).

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mhartl
Argh. It's too bad (for me, at least) that this conflicts with LA RubyConf
(<http://larubyconf.com/>).

~~~
jamesbritt
How does this happen? I thought there were channels and recources for
conference orgs to coordinate such things?

~~~
jeremymcanally
There are, but it just slipped one of our mind's. I believe I posted mine on
the calendar first, but oh well. It doesn't matter.

Things like this are bound to happen when you have so many events going on,
and we're literally on the polar opposite sides of the continent, so it's not
_such_ a big deal. :)

