Rails Conf Day 1 (Portland, OR)

Rails Conf Day 1

Portland is a beautiful place to fly into. I've never seen so many trees. The plane flew right by Mt. Hood (a spectacular view).

Today I attended the Rails Guidebook Tutorial session. The hosts (Dave Thomas and Mike Clark) donated their time in exchange for the attendees making a donation to charity. Thus far they have raised around $12,000 for charity. The url to donate (which they'll keep open until the end of the conference) is here

The guidebook session was divided into 2 parts. The first half of the day covered Ruby. The second half covered Rails. Dave made it clear that, logically, it should be called "Rails on Ruby", but Ruby on Rails sounds sexier, so there you go.

Points of interest / things I did not know before today:

• Innovation happening around the VM (Yarv, JRuby, Rubinius, RubyCLR, Cardinal, IronRuby)
• Lots of comparisons and references to java. Interestingly, most of the people I have met so far (as of day 1) come from a non-java background (perl/php/etc).
• Ruby's method of marking a version as 'stable' is not the same as Rails. In Ruby, experimental releases have odd numbering, where more stable releases have even numbering. In Rails, released Gems are more stable, and experimental work is done in the source control trunk ('RailsEdge').
• Big emphasis on Rails MVC, the benefits of a cohesive MVC framework (which doesn't require lots of xml plumbing) and putting the right code in the right place (business logic vs. presentation logic) when developing Rails applications
• Watch out for code debt. Basically, because it is easy to create so much code, so quickly in rails, that means it is easy to accumulate design debt quickly too!
• Scaffolding is considered passe, but a good way to learn REST
• The crowd seemed interested in some of the finer points of how DB migrations worked.
• Sam Stephenson (Prototype ajax lib) and Thomas Fuchs (Scriptaculous AJAX lib) are members of the core Rails team.
• REST is a hot topic at this conference
• Rails is a single threaded framework. The current approach to scaling (a "share-nothing" architecture) relies on pushing state into a scalable database (and presumably, adding 'worker' servers behind an IP sprayer).
• When asked what he hoped to see in next years conference, Dave Thomas mentioned wanting to hear integration stories (around vm's, other languages, and pre-existing applications).
• Most people doing Ruby/Rails like to do it with Textmate.

Personally, I'd like to see some better tooling: IDE, Code Coverage, and Complexity measurement tools. Hopefully I'll found out more about the state of that over the course of the rest of the conference. Looking forward to the BOF's tonight.