RubyOnRails'berkeley'edu

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RubyOnRails.berkeley.edu

• Armando Fox, Will Sobel, Alex Bain, Arthur
  Klepchukov, Dave Patterson

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Why?

• RoR great candidate for authoring future Web
  applications
• High level of abstraction gt allows innovation
  below rich interface
• High level programmer productivity gt fast
  gratification without sacrificing pedagogy
• Software eng. courses lag industry practice
• Shrinkwrap gt DADO current courses focus on D,
  largely exclude ADO
• Write it yourself gt integrate large building
  blocks extend existing open-source packages
• Write once ship gt continuously
  refine/fix/deploy
• Keep up with the latest trends like Facebook API
  and OpenSocial

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Developing RoR Expertise at Berkeley
Best practices for RoR development, deployment,
scaling

• Investigation of RoR performance and scalability
  (with Sun)

Courses extracurriculars
Instructional computing infrastructure

• Real-world deployment environment for students

• 1-day short course
• Undergraduate project course
• Meetups
• Future SW Engineering course

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Short Course Meetups

• 1-day intensive intro to RoR concepts
• well attended by faculty, industrial sponsors
• Meetups (East Bay Ruby Meetup) now hosted in
  Soda Hall (thru Summer 08)
• http//ruby.meetup.com/81/
• Mailing list ror-announce_at_lists.eecs.berkeley.ed
  u

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CS98/198 Web 2.0 Development in RoR

• Aimed at early undergrads (soph/jr)
• prereqs programming structures in Scheme, basic
  OOP skills (at level of Java or equivalent)
• Goal positive gratification for putting skills
  to use early in your CS career developing
  something you want
• Learn marketable skills and develop good
  programming habits
• Objective small-group (2-4) to develop a web
  application of your own design and choosing
• Weeks 1-2 finger exercises in Ruby/Rails, intro.
  to Web technologies, intro. to relational
  databases
• Week 3 Present project ideas, form groups
• Week 4 Do user stories, CRC cards to floorplan
  development milestones
• Week 5-11 intermediate checkpoints, final demo

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Teaching Web 2.0 Development Cycle

• Goal Industry-realistic intro to Web 2.0
  development
• Agile user stories, velocity, CRC cards,
• Management testing/test-first,SCM using
  Subversion
• Interactive CSS/XHTML separation, JavaScript,
  AJAX
• Deployment Capistrano, Apache, Mongrel, MySQL

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Teaching Ruby

• Heavily functionally-flavored
• minimalist, consistent syntax semantics for OOP
  (inherited from Smalltalk)
• Provides useful, concrete context for
  reinforcing key ideas from introductory CS
  programming course
• render chunk of Web page gt closures
• enumerable objects of varying types gt
  iterators
• convention over configuration gt reflection,
  higher order functions/metaprogramming
• i.e., opportunity to reinforce important but
  subtle CS concepts show them in action

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S07, F07, S08 iterations

• 2 projects with external customers
• Yumify http//www.yumify.com/
• Hesperian http//hesperian.rorclass.org/
• hire strongest alumni to help run course help
  with other RAD Lab RoR projects
• connected to Web 2.0 Entrepreneurship course
  (Center for Enterpreneurship and Technology, UCB
  College of Eng.)
• If register for both, get 1 unit credit towards
  Management of Engineering Innovation
  Certificate
• Driving improvements in Instructional Computing
  environment

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Instructional Computing Enhancements

• Joint work with Shel Waggener (UCB CIO), Bill
  Allison et al., Instructional Svcs. Tech.
• Goal emulate real-life development/deployment
  environments for Web apps
• Campus-wide TextMate editor license
• Campus-wide Subversion repository via CalNet
  authentication
• Shared Hosting and MySQL instance for Web apps
• Future EC2-like, virtual-machine-based student
  deployment environment

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Future Software Engineering Using RoR/Python?

• Goal software engineering pedagogy in context of
  network service development
• Medium-to-large project/team management, agile
  development
• Deployment, measurement, scaling/optimizing
• Discussion with Paul Hilfinger
• Summer 08 planning
• Fall 08 CS 194 with CS upper division credit
• Spring 09 CS 169?

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Conclusion/Discussion

• Bet on RoR (with RAD Lab extensions,
  improvements, ...) as DC integration language
• Create courses, extracurricular activities,
  community/expertise around RoR
• Early success students can choose own projects,
  get working prototype in 8 weeks, exposure to
  industrial practices/tools
• radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/RoR