RailsConf 2006 Report 4 – 3:30 PM CDT

Mid-afternoon update from the RailsConf 2006 Chicago conference.

Curt Hibbs’s talk on understanding the Instant Rails Ruby/Rails/MySQL/Apache bundle for Windows was sparsely attended, probably due to the fact that the Apple Powerbook to attendee ratio is almost equivalent to the same ratio of an Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. Consequently, a majority of the RailsConf attendees were eager to see Rails & Asterisk work together in a real-world dental office environment.

Five Runs’ Steven Smith talked about his company’s equipment configuration to support its Rails-based, open source hosted systems management service. He also shared his experience with making Rails scalable with such recommendations as:

• Don’t maintain state at the web/app level
• Design Rails apps by extraction (ex: Rails was extracted from Basecamp)
• Use the C binding for database access, not the native Ruby-based adapters

I had a great conversation catching up with Kyle Shank on the latest status of his RadRails IDE. Kyle’s team originally hoped they would have the 1.0 release ready in time for the conference, but his busy schedule got in the way. He’s heading off to Europe for the summer to work with IBM on a few projects and he hopes that he will have more time to complete the 1.0 RadRails requirements, including an interactive debugger and a few other enhancements on the way.

I also had an opportunity to speak with several of the Rails core development team which shared some of the more interesting enhancements planned for the Rails 2.0 release, such as plans for supporting RESTful interfaces. Since the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson and several other core team members are employees of Chicago-based 37signals, their enthusiastic interaction with conference attendees has been warmly received and appreciated by the people I spoke with so far.

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