RailsConfEurope07 - Day 2 & 3
Posted by Paolo Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:43:00 GMT
Wow, the RailsConfEurope07 is over. For those of you who are in a hurry I’ll list here my random thoughts:
- The RejectConf has been the funniest event I ever attended!!! (pictures – coverage)
- Ian White’s resource_controller plugin is really cool if you don’t want to mess with REST! You MUST check it out! He should have been accepted as a speaker.
- JRuby is cooler than I ever thought. Definitely worth taking a look at.
- Rails is now officially mainstream.
- The overall experience at the RailsConf was pretty good but not great. The tutorial day was pretty boring, and many speakers weren’t good communicators despite the good content of their speeches.
- I gave a good speech and the room was really full! Thank you all for your support!!!
- The best speech as been “Best Practices” by Marcel Molina Jr and Michael Koziarski.
- I love Dr.Nic.
- Bradley (owner of RailsMachine.com) is a very nice and prepared guy. We’ll evaluate his services soon.
- I missed last year’s _why, Jim and Kathy.
Now let’s dig what we’ve seen and talked about:
David Heinemeier Hansson keynote
He introduced a few new features we’ll be using in Rails 2.0. Nothing that makes me scream, but many many little improvements are coming soon. What I wasn’t really prepared about was his attitude. Very calm and laid back. He took off the “James Dean Jacket” and slowed the pace down. I kind of loved last year’s angry DHH, now everything seems less exciting. He gave us an interesting talk but without emotion in it. I’m wondering if the Rails community will keep doing good without its typical guerrilla attitude. Emotions have driven many Rails developers until now… we’ll see.
Deployment and continuos integration from the trenches by Fernand Galiana
Fair talk about Capistrano and how to dry up your recipe files extracting common behaviors. The only disappointing thing: he didn’t talk about continuous integration!
Screenscraping as changing the legacy world by Jesper Ronn-Jensen and Mads Buus Westmark
These guys put up a talk about their reform plugin. This plugin is capable of screenscraping an html form and gives you an ActiveRecord proxy to that form. This way you can use old legacy applications from your new Rails apps. I don’t like this approach but have to admit thev’ve done an impressive job.
They have been very fair about their plugin telling us it’s not working and not well tested… but… is a speaker supposed to act like this? I mean.. you don’t have to fake if you say “we’re using it in a internal project and it doesn’t work” you don’t make me feel like trying it.
If you want take a look at http://reform.quickanddirty.dk
ThoughtWorks Studios by Ola Bini
Ola Bini, what a guy! He’s a really strange looking person and at first I didn’t like him that much. He reminded me the typical rockstar attitude I hate. Well, I was plain wrong. He gave a good speech about JRuby explaining why it is really worth taking a look at. I used to be a Java programmer and he convinced me.
Great Job Ola. A few things I’ve annotated during his speech you could be interested in:
RubyWorks – Production Stack
A Russian guy working at ToughtWorks Canada (I don’t remember his name) explained the production stack they’re using for JRuby deployment. The presentation content was pretty good but the speaker has been really boring. However, it’s really interesting that a company like ThoughWorks is pushing so hard on JRuby.
Outsourcing to Open Source
Tobias Luetke gave a very interesting talk about his interaction with the community during the development of Shopify.
I wanna start using Liquid ASAP!
Slingshot
Slingshot is a way to let your Rails app work like a desktop app wrapping it in an executable with ruby/rails/mongrel/sqlite3. Pretty clever stuff. You can also sync your local DB with the same app online!
There are probably many other things to say… but nothing that hasn’t been already said somewhere else.
That’s all for now.
Socialize it: 
