If you’ve waited until now before upgrading to Ruby on Rails 2.0 now you may be in for a little surprise.  As of version 2.02 the default database in Rails is SQLite, arguably because there is no need to for grants or the creation of tables, meaning a simpler setup for n00bs.  If you still want to use MySQL (or any other database for that matter) you have to provide the following:

rails -d mysql appname

SQLite3 and the necessary driver gems come preinstalled on OS X Leopard, but if you don’t have the Ruby bindings installed it’s as simple as:

sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

You can always change which db your Rails app is using by changing your config/database.yml.

So this Tuesday I had the honour of presenting at Montreal on Rails 2, where I demoed the Acts As Authenticated and Role Requirement plugins.

I think Marc Andre Cournoyer’s review impressed me the most, mainly that “…[it] is an exploit to be able to code a live app in front of a crowd like this.“ It’s a testament to the power of Rails and I’m just glad the Roles portion didn’t bomb the way it had during my rehearsals at home.

I was especially impressed by Chris Scott’s demo of the Ext JS framework. Sorry Darin, but there are some pretty nice features in Ext that will make me want to take a closer look. Terje Tjervaag’s demo of Firebug was convincing enough to make me wonder why I hadn’t already installed it yet. Used it at work today to great effect. You can read more reviews of the night here and here, while photos have been posted on Flickr and videos might pop up on Youtube.

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking about user authentication at the next Montreal on Rails meetup, scheduled for Tuesday the 4th of September at the McGill MAASS Chemistry building, room 328. The show starts at 18h45 and I think I’ll be the first to present, so come early.

Although user authentication may sound like an advanced topic, it will be aimed mostly at the novice Rails developer as a showcase of how easy it can be to implement advanced features such as user security and roles in a Rails application. I hope to touch on a few items including the excellent Acts As Authenticated, roles and salting. If there’s anything in particular you would like to see, drop me an email.

Last night’s Montreal on Rails meetup (their first ever) was a large step up from the Commodore 64 disk swaps of my youth, but probably a lot more significant as far as self improvement goes. A good 30-35 people showed up and the two presentations given were fantastic.

The first presentation topic was improving tests, it was given by Marc Cournoyer and included a hilarious introduction to a somewhat advanced topic. The next presentation was given by Carl Mercier, who introduced the extremely useful HAML, which appears to cut the code in your views by half by generating HTML using a simplified indentation scoped ruby based markup. Very simple and very powerful stuff and I’ll be trying it shortly.

Overall the people who attended the meetup were great and I look forward to the next one. It’s so good to see a vibrant developer scene in Montreal.