talks

This session will introduce the file_column plugin that makes file uploads with ruby on rails as easy as they should be. The talk will introduce you to the file_column plugin on two levels:

It will show you, how to add file upload capabilities to your rails application, keep uploaded files even when redisplaying forms because of validation errors and automatically resize uploaded images or create thumb-nails. You will learn where uploaded files are stored and how this can be integrated with SwitchTower.

The second part of the talk is about plugin development in general. The file_column plugin uses quite a bit of meta-programming to add its features seamlessly into the rails core and we will dissect these techniques, so that this talk can be useful to a lot of plugin developers. In fact, in the beginning, file_column's functionality was provided completely in auto-generated methods, but this was hard to maintain. We will take a look at how you can work around this for more complicated plugin's to get beautiful, easy-to-maintain and extend code while still offering a nice and simple API to the user.

The talk will include regular slides and code samples, as well as a live demo to show off file_column's easy-of-use.