RailsConf 2006 Report 6 – 11:15 AM CDT

RailsConf attendees hit the ground running the first half of the morning with several technical sessions and a series of real-world Rails use case presentations.

Jeremy Voorhis' talk on Internationalizing Rails educated the audience on globalization and localization of Rails, as well as using such handy Ruby modules as 'jcode' to properly support Unicode in Rails applications.

Justin Gehtland's Ajax on Rails talk was given to an overflowing standing room only audience and was one of the most technically in-depth presentations given yet at the conference. Justin shared his experiences and code working with Ajax and Rails and provided slick approaches to making it vastly easier to work with a web browser's Document Object Model.

Thoughtwork's employee Obie Fernandez shared several projects his company managed using Ruby on Rails and how the technology quickly diffused throughout the organization as the popular word spread about the manageability and productivity gains achieved using the Rails framework. Obie related a story about how a project manager who wasn't even a programmer by trade was able to create a time and billing system using Rails that was so well received by his department that the company is considering rolling it out for use across the entire corporation. Obie also shared his success with adopting the Extreme Programming model, as well as how several Thoughtworks Java and .NET developers have since migrated to the Ruby camp. Interestingly enough, Obie postulated that it is easier for .NET developers to migrate to Rails since .NET developers are already used to working within a web framework akin to Rails.

After a brief morning break, the second set of sessions began with a talk by Steven Hammond on creating a Domain Specific Language (DSL) Rails plug-in. Steven admitted that the motivation to do a DSL in Rails was due to a mammals/reptile evolutionary game he wanted to port to the web and decided to use Rails to create his DSL. He explained what a DSL was ("a partial programming language focused on a specific problem domain that generally tries to replicate syntax common to users of that domain.") and examples of horizontal and vertical DSLs (such as insurance company systems and circuit board layer specification systems).

Doug Fales presented a talk on his experience creating a Ruby GEM for his need to create a mashup of GPS readings with photos taken from those locations. Essentially, Doug's solution is:

Flickr + Google Maps + the GPX Ruby GEM he wrote = www.walkingboss.com.

I wasn't able to catch much of Scott Raymond's presentation on his lessons learned from two Rails projects he worked on called Blinksale using the REST API and IconBuffet, which uses Ajax via RJS templates, but the talk was delivered to a packed audience nonetheless.

More RailsConf 2006 updates to follow shortly...

Posted at 11:15 AM  Permalink

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