RailsConf 2006 Report 3 – 12:00 PM CDT

I caught the first half of Adam Key’s entertaining talk on comparing Ruby on Rails development with listening to the music of AC/DC and Stravinsky.

Some of Adam’s observations include:

Adam’s Law of AC/DC
"If you know the title, you’ll know the chorus." A Ruby on Rails corollary is "Read the URL and you’ll know the name of the controller (and possibly the model too)."

Another example Adam provided was the intentional, discernable space between notes in AC/DC's Back in Black and how developers could learn from this by not overburdening their designs with Eddie Van Halen-style fills, making what could have been a clear rocker into a doodling distraction.

I caught the second half of a talk on Tooling Rails by Kyle Shank, Matt Kent and Marc Baumbach. DDJ podcast listeners may remember I conducted an interview with Kyle several weeks ago – you can listen to the podcast here. They talked about their RadRails IDE and their experience working with an open source business model – they concluded that making money with a purely open source approach may not be fiscally rewarding. Sidenote: the Ruby faithful in the audience responded negatively to the fact that RadRails is based on Eclipse, and when they were asked to demo the IDE they had a number of Java-related errors. I followed up after the talk with Kyle and asked him about the status of RadRails 1.0.

The most popular presentation so far was Mike Clark's Intro to Capistrano, with attendees overflowing outside the standing room only crowd. Deployment is obviously a big issue on the minds of many Ruby developers.

Posted at 12:53 PM  Permalink

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