RailsConf 2006 Report 8 – 9:30 PM CDT - FINAL REPORT

This report ends my coverage of RailsConf 2006 Chicago, closing with comments on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson's Saturday evening keynote to RailsConf attendees.

Several afternoon sessions spanned topics from Rails performance improvement and testing to web accessibility.

Glenn Vanderburg's popular talk on Testing Migrations reminded the audience that Rails currently does not have migration testing capabilities built in, even though Rails is one of the easiest frameworks to perform database migrations. "ActiveRecord model abstractions are leaky, especially prevalent when performing unit tests."

Accelerating Rails with Lighty, presented by Badrinath Janakiraman, reviewed the various HTTP servers and CGI delivery mechanisms for Rails, covering CGI, FastCGI, SCGI and Lighttpd. He had these Rails delivery performance tips to share:

• The less Rails you use, the faster it gets.
• Cache as much as you can.
• Use the 404 Eror handler to call Rails only for non-cached content.
• Use Content Legnth, If-Modified-Since and ETags for dynamic content management.

Badrinath noted that cached Rails content is automatically compressed and ETag'ed by Lighttpd, further helping to reduce overall server load. He also mentioned that a new version of Lighttpd is under development, featuring native Win32 support and a new I/O subsystem.

I only caught the last few minutes of Jason Kunesh's talk on Rails, Ajax and Universal Design, where Jason asserted that Rails and Ajax especially fall behind in accessibility. "No accessibility, no usability, no product." However, Jason did emphasize to his audience that "Ruby on Rails is fast becoming the API for web applications, UI to DB like the Windows API once was for desktop applications."

After a brief late afternoon break, attendees regrouped for Mike Clark's extremely well received presentation on Testing Rails Apps. One of the comments I overheard from one of the attendees was "I've looked at other frameworks, but the only reason I use Rails is because of its integrated testing capabilities."

Nathaniel Talbott's session, titled Homesteading: A Thriver's Guide, discussed his experiences of becoming an entrepreneur in the realm of Ruby on Rails consulting. Frankly, it wasn't that good of a talk (especially since there have been bookstores filled with just such subject matter) and consequently, people started leaving before it concluded... perhaps because it was also just around dinner time.

After dinner, Rails creator and benevolent dictator David Heinemeier Hansson delivered his keynote address. Prior to that, I had the pleasure of interviewing David on his and Rails celebrated rise in popularity. He was clearly enjoying Rails success and empahsized that "I'm not done!" He was happy with Rails ability to achieve both quick and clean development (a reference to Thoughtworks' Chief Scientist Martin Fowler's comments made during yesterday's keynote). He also said "There are no cathedrals left in the framework world," and that "PHP is an example of the Bazaar gone slightly wrong." He admitted that "Rails may not be for everybody, but we want to be the framework for most applications." He also humbly admitted that Rails may simply be a stepping stone to an even better framework, but at least it's going in the right direction. As our conversation came to a close, I asked him what his which Rails applications he was most fond of, and his first choice was Seattle-based Robot Corp's 43things.com, a Rails-based 'To Do List' site with a reflective twist. He also thought shopify.com was a slick Ruby on Rails e-commerce front end.

With regards to David's keynote, he talked about the perceived problem with Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD), defending his reasoning behind the asthetic design constructs of its implementation in Rails within the context of ActiveRecord. He also demonstrated a prime case how he "tried to be RESTful" with the relationships between Users and Groups and how they are elements of the Membership class.

David also said...

"Frameworks act as either the devil or the angel, and the devil acts mostly by being quiet."

"Rails takes an active role in educating developers."

"If you're not already doing testing, well you should damn it, and we'll force you to do so."

"CRUD is not a goal, it's an aspiration, a design technique."

"No one paradigm can encapsulate all of the world all of the time."

Without question, attending RailsConf will make any stalwart Java or .NET developer a true Ruby on Rails believer.

Posted at 09:04 PM  Permalink

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