RailsConf '08-Passionate about Rails

"Passionate and fascinating" is the way one developer summed up RailsConf 2008 in Portland May 26-June 1, the largest physical gathering of Ruby and Rails developers in the world.

His view was echoed in conversations and blogs by many of the more than 1,800 programmers from around the world who attended the four-day conference co-presented by O'Reilly Media and Ruby Central. Some of the conference-goers have already made plans to go to RailsConf Europe, scheduled for September 2-4 in Berlin.

Mindful that Rails is a maturing technology created almost four years ago, RailsConf 2008 focused on advanced-level topics and sessions, especially around design or coding techniques, testing tools, and deployment techniques. The goal was to help developers expand Rails applications and build successful businesses with them. The conference was jam-packed with skill-building tutorials, 80 sessions by experts with their fingers on the pulse of Rails development, and opportunities for hands-on, collaborative learning.

"RailsConf 2008, two words: passionate and fascinating. I met so many people over the past 3 days who are absolutely in love with the work they're doing," wrote developer Dary Merckens on ESPN Dev Blog at the end of the conference. "And all of the talks were so interesting! There was a nugget or two (or six) of programming goodness in literally every talk I attended...In conclusion, can't wait for RailsConf 2009!"

New at RailsConf this year was conference chair Chad Fowler's Community Project Code-Drive, on the conference's first day. People pitched their projects and the work they hoped to get done, and interested developers rolled up their sleeves to write code and make it happen.

"I'm always looking for ways to get humans together for meaningful (potentially lasting) interactions at our conferences," Fowler said on his conference blog. "Think of it as a room full of code sprints happening all at once." The experiment was so successful that Fowler plans to do it again at the European RailsConf in September.

Four keynote speakers and a keynote panel headlined the four-day conference, which was overseen by Fowler and associate chairs David A. Black and Rich Kilmer.

-Keynote speakers were Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software), David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals), Jeremy Kemper (37signals), and Kent Beck (Three Rivers Institute-TRI).

-The keynote panel was a Q&A with the core developers of Rails: Hansson, Kemper, Michael Koziarski (Koziarski Software Limited), and Rick Olson (ActiveReload, LLC).

Hansson's keynote was sparked by the passion that permeated the conference. "DHH started by talking about how there is a surplus of productivity when developing with Rails. Ruby on Rails is still a very small community compared to other platforms/frameworks/etc out there, but we can produce so much more and we can turn that productivity into additional revenue," developer Drew Blas commented in a May 31 blog. "He hit on a terrific point that the reason our community is so great is because Rails developers have realized that we are all trying to 'climb the same mountain'. None of us are all that special and the more we can help each other the better."

Among the 80 other presentations at RailsConf 2008 were:

- Dan Benjamin (Rails Machine), "Entrepreneurs on Rails"

- Rick Bradley (OG Consulting), Yossef Mendelssohn (OG Consulting), Kevin Barnes (OGC), "Waxing Ballroom Floors on the Titanic (and Other Less Seaworthy Vessels)"

- Lewis Cirne (New Relic, Inc.), "Dispelling the Myths about Rails Performance"

- Robert Dempsey (Atlantic Dominion Solutions, LLC), "Agile Development Demystified"

- Obie Fernandez (HashRocket), "The Worst Rails Code You've Ever Seen (And How Not to Write It Yourself)"

- Geoffrey Grosenbach (Topfunky Corporation), Tom Preston-Werner (Powerset, Inc.), Chris Wanstrath (Err Free), PJ Hyett (Err Free), Ben Curtis (Catch the Best), "The Profitable Programmer: Creating Successful Side Projects"

- Adam Keys (FiveRuns), "Oh the Fail I've Known"

- John Lam (Microsoft), Jimmy Schementi (Microsoft), "IronRuby on Rails"

- Dan Manges (ThoughtWorks), Zak Tamsen (ThoughtWorks), "Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing"

- Mike Mangino (Elevated Rails), "Facebook Development and Performance with Rails"

- Micah Martin (8th Light, Inc.), "10 Things I Hate About Web Apps"

- Stephen Midgley (Hutz.com), "CRUD Doesn't Have an 'S' in It: Managing Complex Searching in Rails"

- Josh Owens (Intridea, Inc/Web 2.0 Show Podcast), Chris Selmer (Intridea, Inc.), "Building an App in 48 Hours - A Rails Rumble Case Study"

- Evan Phoenix (Engine Yard), Brian Ford (Engine Yard), Wilson Bilkovich (Engine Yard), "Rubinius - Under the Hood and Behind the Curtain"

- John Straw (YELLOWPAGES.COM), "Surviving the Big Rewrite: Moving YELLOWPAGES.COM to Rails"

- Bob Walker (GemStone Systems, Inc.), Avi Bryant (Dabble DB), "MagLev: Ruby That Scales"

- Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Engine Yard), Jamie van Dyke (Engine Yard), Tom Mornini (Engine Yard), "Hosting and the Woes"

Sponsors included Engine Yard, Sun Microsystems, FiveRuns, GotThingsDone, Heroku, ThoughtWorks, Atlantic Dominion Solutions, Blue Box Group, CodeGear, E-xact, ELC Technologies, EnterpriseDB, GemStone Systems, Intridea, Morph Labs, New Relic, and RightScale .

Several sponsors and participants made important announcements during RailsConf 2008:

- Jeremy Kemper announced the release of Rails 2.1, which has been in development for six months. He said 1,400 contributors have been creating patches and vetting them, resulting in more than 1,600+ patches and 9,000 comments.

- Avi Bryant and Bob Walker of GemStone revealed plans for the MagLev project. MagLev will run Ruby on Rails within GemStone's distributed object technology.
- Intridea, Inc. announced the summer 2008 release of the MediaPlug on-demand service, which enables IT professionals to transcode and store complex media files using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Intridea also announced the debut of Scalr, which company officials describe as "the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment" using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
- E-xact Transactions Ltd. announced Web Secure Pay (WSP), a new Web Secure Pay solution developed with Chase Paymentech. This highly secure, easy-to-integrate solution lets merchants process payments without the hassle of complicated data security practices.

- Engine Yard previewed Rubinius, which now runs Ruby on Rails. This achievement marks a critical milestone toward delivering a fully compatible Ruby implementation.
- Engine Yard and New Relic announced a partnership, in which Engine Yard will give its customers exclusive complimentary access to New Relic's introductory level of service, New Relic RPM Basic. New Relic hosts its Rails performance management solution on an Engine Yard private cluster.

- GotThingsDone.com presented WhoDoes 2.0, a new version of the web-based application for collaboration of activities and coordination of the team.

- Morph Labs demonstrated that it takes five minutes or less to use their web application platform.
- Microsoft demonstrated integration between their new Silveright browser plug-in technology for rich Internet applications and the Ruby on Rails Web framework.

- Microsoft officials also demonstrated IronRuby, a version of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .net platform, running a Ruby on Rails application.
- FiveRuns launched TuneUp, a social debugging tool for Rails applications.

With the wrap-up of RailsConf 2008, the next opportunity for the Rails community to experience the same kind of total immersion in Rails developments will be RailsConf Europe 2008 in Berlin September 2-4. For complete information on RailsConf Europe 2008, visit:
www.railsconfeurope.com

For complete information on RailsConf 2008, visit: http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/content/home

For speaker presentation files, go to: http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/proceedings

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More O'Reilly Conferences:

- RailsConf Europe 2008 in Berlin September 2-4, co-presented with Ruby Central
- Web 2.0 Expo New York in New York September 16-19, 2008, co-produced with TechWeb - Web 2.0 Expo Europe in Berlin October 21-23, 2008, co-produced with TechWeb - Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco November 5-7, 2008, co-produced with TechWeb - O'Reilly Money:Tech Conference in New York City February 4-6, 2009 - O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City February 9-11, 2009 - O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Jose, CA, March 9-12, 2009 - Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco in San Francisco March 31-April 3, 2009, co-produced with Tech Web - MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA, April 20-23, 2009, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and MySQL - Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, CA, May 19-21, 2009 - Velocity in San Jose, CA, June 22-24, 2009

For a conference overview, visit: http://conferences.oreilly.com

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