Any idea what you are planning on discussing? While I probably would not be interested in a listening to an ‘Introduction to Rails’ presentation just for the sake of learning I would not mind attending for support.

I do think it would be nice to see if we can get the User Group going again. I think the adoption of Rails has accelerated in the last two years and there may be more developers and interested parties now.

Excellent point, Alan.

Here is the brief outline of the presentation:

- basics of Ruby (Ruby, RubyGems, ActiveSupport)
- what is Rails
- why opinionated frameworks are good [in my opinion]
- model-view-controller (ie MVC) paradigm
- let’s see Rails in action
- staying DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
- customizing Rails to fit your project
- be resource oriented, be RESTful

Hopefully some time for Q&A

And as I said, I will be glad to see established Rails developers there too. Maybe this way we can gain a critical mass to restart Rails group too.
I think that Rails is very well adopted by now, and it is more a matter of company policies or software heritage that drives peoples choice.
In the last few years many popular sites were built with Rails (Twitter for example), which sort of proved that it is all for real.
It may be still not the prime choice for enterprise people, as they are already well into Java or .NET and see no need to seek other options. Plus it is easier to deal with integration of corporate IT piecework when it is from the same vendor and on the same platform, although technologies like SSO (single sign on) do allow Rails applications run seamlessly within existing Java or .NET infrastructure.

I got a note today that the presentation is scheduled at 9am at Room 3.

I would like to thank you everybody who came to the presentation.
You can download slides at http://vtrails.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/WhyRails.pdf