I was recently asked by Jan Brasna if I had a copy of the Ajax preso I gave at Web Essentials last year.

Embarrassingly the online version, which existed at we05-ajax-preso.aviditybytes.com, has been MIA since I moved all our sites over to wonderful guys at segpub.

It was designed to be viewed only on Safari at certain resolutions, so I’ve decided not to get the live demo up and instead to update the code in our SVN. The code is free to steal and plunder and the presentation content is Creative Commons.

If you’ve Ruby installed (1.8.2+, and no you don’t need Rails) and an SVN client you can checkout the presentation from: http://svn.aviditybytes.com/presentations/we05_ajax_presentation/

The S5 page generation is powered by a simple YAML file and the slides themselves are just Rails views (well, partials actually).

Though powered by an aged and slightly modified Rails (0.13.1, modified to work with Ruby 1.8.4+) it’s still useful for anybody looking to see an example of a dead-simple, database-less Rails application.

To run the application fire up your terminal/prompt, type ruby script/server in the application’s directory and point your favourite browser (Safari’s most pretty) to http://127.0.0.1:3000/