OT: Invitation to some groovy LiveCode based co-learning!

[David Bovill]

Anyone out there interested in learning how to build upon their Rev ?
LiveCode experience and learn how to integrate this with modern web
frameworks?

I'm taking the plunge, and have forked out silly amounts of money to buy a
bunch of books, and think that there may be some other people on the list
that would be interested in learning this stuff too? It will be a lot more
fun in a group of a few of us - and well that's a lot more "Live coding"
style isn't it :)

I'm proposing taking a subject that I know very little about, learning a few
steps and making some quick videos and LiveCode based example code,
available each week, and supporting this with the option to take part in a
Live Coding event via small live video conferencing. The live events will be
limited to no more than 20 people.

As a starting subject, I'm going to take a look at something which will be
both useful to the community as a tool, and a little geeky so that well to
be honest we don;t get too many people wanting to do it while we iron out
the kinks on how to do this properly.

*Groovy*
The topic is going to be integrating LiveCode with "Ruby on Rails" like
frameworks. To be even more geeky, I'm choosing the Java based version of
Rails - Grails <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grails_%28framework%29>, which
in turn is based on Groovy. We'll learn how to use LiveCode to script the
command line tools that come with these frameworks and mix and match
LiveCode front ends, and even server side code written in LiveCode. Anyone
interested in accompanying me on my journey to learn more about these modern
web frameworks and how they use "object relational mapping", MVC, closures,
naming conventions, and all sorts of other goodies (like integrating
LiveCode with Java - Jan are you out there :) - feel free to join in.

*What we will make*
The practical part of the project is going to be to build an online database
of open source handlers using these modern tools. That is we will get up a
quick and dirty web site that is based on the LiveCode object model we are
all familiar with - stacks, cards, groups and so forth to create a
search-able repository of open source handlers. Grails, will allow us to
create simple web services, around this database, one in which we can ad all
sorts of cool things like folksonomy tagging, dependency graphing and the
like. We'll start simple, frankly we will have to because this is not my
field at all - but will I think end up with a useful community service and a
shed load of groovy learning.

*No teachers, no guarantees. We are all in this together!*
So this is not going to be a course in any traditional sense. The aim is we
learn from each other, in a bit more of a visual and fun way than we can do
on an email list. I'm going to experiment with a number of features
including live screen casting, that make this possible, but that won't be an
essential part of the gig. That is turning up for the live events - is going
to be an optional but fun part of the experience.

I'll send an invite out for the first one in a follow up email.