RailsConf Europe - Tuesday Keynotes

September 18th, 2007

Tuesday is ending now with some final keynotes

Basically sandwiching in Roy Fielding, a uber-guru of the web between some Diamond sponsors seems like a commercialization thing. A theme of the conference maybe.

Beyond Startups: Rails Demand in the Global 2000

Thanks to Jonathan Siegel we heard the obvious, that yes some Global 2000 companies are starting to use Rails. Big shock. Shame the man can’t present at all. Little note, if your sponsorship money buys you a presentation, learn how to present an engaging talk.

The Rest of REST

An intellectual and precise talk by Roy Fielding, was interesting and historically educating but academic for most people there. Still I find the elements of architectural style and forming lasting styles of architecture is really interesting from a consulting point of view. The architectural style a way of deducing principles of technology removed from any of the problems of actual languages and products.

Rails and the Next Generation Web

Craig McClanahan is a great speaker and someone we are interested to hear from. This should be the principle of buying your speaking slot, put up something interesting with an interesting topic, not just a marketing speech.

Craig talks about his love of Ruby and Rails even after being a Java-guy for so many years. A shift for Sun? Rich Internet Applications and Horizontal scaling, gone is Moore’s Law. Well Craig says that Java web frameworks pace of innovation is slowing, and the Java community know they need to look to the future. Could the Rails community go snow-blind also? Forget to look to the future..

Mentions three plugins. act_as_cached, act_as_state_machine, will_paginate… get it wrong as they only extend ActiveRecord. While acts_as_autenticator, paginator gets it right as they don’t care about the implementation.

make_resourceful plugin is a good example of separating API from implementation where you could plugin ActiveResource or ActiveRecord.

Unfortunately Craig only has 50 minutes which is no time at all. I would love to hear a proper 2 hr talk from him as it seems he has some great stuff to say.

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