log4p

Today I visited the (free) RubyEnRails 2007 conference. Although my day job doesn’t include any Ruby or Rails at the moment I keep hoping that is will in the (near) future. During weekends and evenings I use Rails for small websites and services.

The conference opened by a keynote presented by Dr. Nic Williams; a bit chaotic here and there and not really addressing the topic (’The future of Rails’) but nice the watch nevertheless.

Right after the keynote Aslak Hellesøy showed us the world of RSpec. Good presentation. The concept of RSpec is basically to allow for specification driven development and during his live demo this seemed to work really well. To bad Java doesn’t really have a good way to write tests before coding; the test just wouldn’t compile.

A session has to be really terrible for me to leave before the end. The session about RJS was one of those. Bad examples, horrible HTML and a presenter not so gifted at speaking to an audience.

After enjoying lunch and speaking to various (ex-)colleagues/friends/other attendees I went to the ‘Ruby Meets Cocoa’ talk by Eloy Duran. Great stuff! With just the OSX interface builder, a couple of lines of code and active record Eloy managed to build a fat, database driven application using Cocoa within 30 minutes. I’ll definitely want to play around with this! The presentation can be found here.

I decided to go to the presentation given by one of my colleagues: Camping for the rest of us. Good presentation, lot’s of humor and live coding. Remco actually managed to impress me with a framework which I deemed laughable at best. There might actually be some cases were I could actually use it. No idea on how you would deploy a camping application by the way… More information about this presentation (including slides and sourcecode) can be found at Remco’s blog.

The Betty Builder presentation didn’t cut it for me; I just don’t like graphical javascript editors messing with application code…

After a quick sprint to the ‘green’ conference room I managed to get into Andy’s talk on Mongrel clusters. Nice to know that some people actually care about more than code and take the overall picture into account.

‘Ruby Banter’ started with a really horrendous joke about making RubyOnRails enterprise ready: ad a 20 msec sleep before each request. Last time I checked Java beat the crap out of Ruby performance-wise; JRuby is even reported to be faster then the MRI. The rest of the talk was filled with nice programming tricks mostly related to closures/blocks/lambda/operators (=== / <=>). Nice but not really useful.

Matthijs Langenberg did a presentation on REST/ActiveResource. I have serious doubts considering REST. The is a good reason for SOAP to have WSDL for describing services and exchange formats; REST seriously lacks this and makes cross platform communication quite painful in my opinion. For remoting between Rails applications ActiveResource seems to be quite ok.

The closing session was ‘Page, Action and Fragment Caching’. Caching, in my experience one of the trickier parts of complex / clustered high traffic applications. The examples he showed where quite nice. Rails seems to have (at least functionally) caught up in the caching area. Signaling in clusters for file based caches isn’t supported yet however; Action caches can use a distributed hashmap to solve this problem.

All in all I had a really nice day; learned a lot and updated my (superficial) knowledge of Rails to the latest trends. Congratulation to the people who organized the event; you did a great job!