RailsConf 2006 Report 2 – 10:30 AM CDT

Dave Thomas delivered a thought provoking opening keynote on unsolved Ruby on Rails problems.

He first established Ruby’s rapid ascent to global developer awareness with the help of Google search and Google Trends. His example showed that a search on Ruby on Rails returned 21 million results and numerous diverse Ruby advertisements. Google Trends showed that Ruby on Rails is rapidly gaining ground on Websphere and JBoss and has already overtaken Tapestry, Spring and Zend from a search lookup perspective. David then express three areas of Ruby on Rails development that needs to be improved to further promote Ruby in the corporate development environment. These are:

• Data Integration
  • Better use of schemas
  • Better foreign key support
  • Support distributed two-phase commit transactions
  • Standardize attribute-based finders
  • Better support for non-database models (ex: JMS/MQ integration)

• Real-world CRUD
  • Upgrade the Rails scaffolding to an AJAX-based interface.
  • Support table relationships (ex: many-to-many).
  • Allow for configurable, custom display styles, cross-application skins and UI elements
  • Bring the simplicity of Active Record to Views and Controllers

• Deployment
  • Capistrano is "the best deployment system there is, but we can make it better."
  • Account for cooperative development
  • Decouple application configurations from server configurations
  • App Config considerations should include such things as where to find/put files, library/environment requirements, etc.
  • Server Config considerations such as server config files, permissions/security (passwords, ACL’s, etc.)
  • "Set up the server once and set up individual applications as needed."
  • An example Capistrano string might look like: cap deploy --on cap://server.com
  • The Capistrano file should be ISP independent (ex: Ask ISP’s "What Capistrano profile do you support?")
  • Consider packaging GEMs similar to the way Java WAR files are contained and deployed.

Dave closed his keynote with the following witticisms:

"Rails and Ruby have corrupted me."
"I’ve been Java free for 18 months."
"All developers deserve to be happy."

More from RailsConf 2006 Chicago to follow shortly....

Posted at 12:44 PM  Permalink

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