has_many :thoughts

When the merger of Merb and Rails was announced a few months ago, I don’t think anyone really expected the goal of having Rails 3 released at RailsConf to be met. Alas, it was not. But David announced today that much of the groundwork to combining the two frameworks has already been done. Most of the work has been behind the scenes refactoring—the kind of changes that developers will likely never notice. But other features that are in the codebase and coming soon include:

• An all-new router, with an improve DSL that’s more merbish. It will include routing based on subdomains and user gents, and the ability to mount multiple apps side by side.
• Since many developers aren’t consistently using the h() helper method to escape potential script injections, the default behavior will now be to escape everything except when an all-new raw() method is utilized.
• Much of the code to make Rails JS framework agnostic is complete. New features include using data=remote=”true” and data-method=”delete” (which validate in HTML5) to allow unobtrusive binding of JS events.

David equated the new Rails philosophy to Burger King’s “Have it Your Way” concept. If I want a great burger, I can order a Whopper. But, if I have specific tastes, I can order it without pickles. Or with extra ketchup. Rails will allow you to get a great framework out of the box for users that just want it to work. But, for those that are passionate about a particular JS framework or other toolset, they can freely customize their Rails.

Toward the end of David’s keynote, he relayed a couple experiences he’s had. He reminded us to make sure that, as developers, we don’t accept the requirements bestowed upon us by stakeholders at face value. We need to constantly offer up alternatives and input. In his experience, many times when you relay to the stakeholder a different, sometimes lest costly, way to do things, their response is often: “Sure, whatever”.

This approach can save we developers hours of wasted time. That’s because, when stuck on a tough challenge, as time drags on, our motivation drops. We try to keep up our spirits but, when it looks like the challenge is impossible, we end up burning needless hours. We should quit at the point our mind checks out and reexamine the problem. David gave an example of a tough issue he worked on for two weeks and he explained that only a week and half of it he was really working and after that the rest was just goofing around because he already had given up. He should have gone back to stakeholders right then rather than burning a few more days with zero motivation.

Here are my tentative selections for RailsConf 2008. Looking forward to everything!

• Refactoring Your Rails Application
• Developer Testing Tricks

• Entrepreneurs On Rails
• Hosting and the Woes
• Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper
• “Design Patterns” in Ruby
• UI Design on Rails

• Optimizing Rails
• Asynchronous Processing with Ruby on Rails
• Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing
• Integration Testing with RSpec’s Story Runner
• Metaprogramming and Ruby Internals for Rails Programmers

• De-Railing: Smashing the Rails Stack
• Oh the Fail I’ve Known
• Building an app in 48 hours – A Rails Rumble Case Study

Below is the schedule I came up with when going over the sessions available this year at RailsConf… Going to try to make these, if not switch with Colin so we cover the conference well… very glad to see some advanced classes! Would have loved a REAL advanced Rspec session though.

8:30am Thursday, 05/29/2008
Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit Portland Ballroom 252
Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks), Patrick Farley (ThoughtWorks) Ruby is the revenge of the Smalltalkers. Not since Smalltalk has a language had such powerful meta-programming facilities. While this may seem like a minor feature, it turns out that surgical meta-programming allows solutions to problems that are clearer, more concise, more maintainable, and take orders of magnitudes fewer lines of code. Read more.

1:30pm Thursday, 05/29/2008
Powering AIR Applications with Rails Portland Ballroom 252 Tony Hillerson (EffectiveUI), Daniel Wanja (Nouvelles Solutions, Inc.) Adobe’s AIR platform offers developers familiar with web technology the tools to create desktop applications. Come and learn how to drive an HTML and a Flex AIR application with Rails using RubyAMF. Read more.

10:45am Friday, 05/30/2008
Entrepreneurs On Rails Portland Ballroom 251
Dan Benjamin (Rails Machine) Many of the people working with Rails are independent developers, doing freelance work or running small development shops. This makes sense – Rails provides a great framework for an indy developer, making it easy to work with with designers and other developers. Read more.

11:45am Friday, 05/30/2008
Hosting and the Woes Portland Ballroom 255
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard), Jamie van Dyke (Engine Yard), Tom Mornini (Engine Yard) What are the day to day issues with Rails hosting. How can they be solved, and what are the best practise methods of avoiding them. Engine Yard have extensive experience with high volume Rails applications and would like to talk about what we’ve learned and what our customers have learnt. Read more.

1:50pm Friday, 05/30/2008
Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper Portland Ballroom 256
Yehuda Katz (EngineYard) This session will cover using the DataMapper ORM with Ruby on Rails, and go in-depth into its code. It will focus on integration with Ruby on Rails and provide an advanced-level overview of the codebase and design philosophy. Read more.

2:50pm Friday, 05/30/2008
Rubinius – Under the Hood and Behind the Curtain D135-136
Evan Phoenix (Engine Yard), Brian Ford (Engine Yard), Wilson Bilkovich (Engine Yard) Rubinius is a virtual machine built from the ground up to provide a robust, high-performance runtime for Ruby code. The Rubinius team is guiding the development of 20,000+ specifications that define the Ruby language. Read more.

4:25pm Friday, 05/30/2008
The Launch: Dos and Don’ts of Real Life Deploys Portland Ballroom 255
Chris Wanstrath (Err Free) There’s more to launching an app than “cap deploy”—the process is as much a psychological challenge as a technical one. So, what does it take to launch an app you can depend on and be proud of? With a handful of production launches under his belt, Chris will talk about the big picture and little details of bringing your site to life. Read more.

10:45am Saturday, 05/31/2008
Assembling Pages Last: Edge Caching, ESI & Rails Portland Ballroom 256
Aaron Batalion (Hungry Machine LLC) When working on scaling Rails to millions of users/day with complex personalization, caching becomes essential. This talk will cover edge caching, edge side includes (ESI) in Rails, and partial page caching higher in the stack. It will also cover ESI as a fabric for assembling heterogeneous applications into a single, cacheable web experience. Read more.

11:45am Saturday, 05/31/2008
Advanced RESTful Rails Portland Ballroom 252
Ben Scofield (Viget Labs) Designing RESTful systems in Rails carries many benefits. It is not a problem-free approach, however; there are accessibility issues with the standard conventions, and some functions are more difficult to map to resources than others. In this session, we’ll look at solutions for these (and other) problems that arise when you take REST beyond the standard examples. Read more.

1:50pm Saturday, 05/31/2008
Build Your Own Distributed, Self-Configuring Rails Cluster Portland Ballroom 251
Dave Fayram (Powerset, Inc), Tom Preston-Werner (Powerset, Inc.) Fuzed is a Rails server stack written in Erlang that can replace standard mongrel/reverse proxy architectures. It focuses on reliability and ease of deployment in distributed environments. Read more.

2:50pm Saturday, 05/31/2008
Custom Nginx Modules: Accelerate Rails, HTTP Tricks General Portland Ballroom 251
Adam Wiggins (Heroku) Got a Rails app that needs even more speed? Adam Wiggins of Heroku will show you how to write a custom Nginx module to bring blinding speed to critical code paths (and do HTTP tricks that can’t be done with Rails and Mongrel alone), using examples from Heroku’s own authentication module ngx_heroku_gate. Dust off your C compiler and prepare to push the limits of nginx, Rails, and HTTP. Read more.

4:25pm Saturday, 05/31/2008
Metaprogramming and Ruby Internals for Rails Programmers Portland Ballroom 256
Patrick Farley (ThoughtWorks) Rails programmers are Ruby programmers. In this session we’ll cover some useful Ruby metaprogramming techniques as used in real world Rails applications and extensions. Then we’ll dig deep into MRI and JRuby source to gain a nuanced understanding of the implementation details of Singletons, Mixins and the Ruby Object model. Read more.

10:45am Sunday, 06/01/2008
Scaling Ruby from the Inside Out Portland Ballroom 252
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (EngineYard) This is a talk about what it takes to really scale Ruby applications. We will not only examine all the aspects of hardware and web server configurations, we will also look at scaling the ruby interpreter itself. Including performance quirks of MRI and how Rubinius is set to fix a lot of these problems. Read more.

11:45am Sunday, 06/01/2008
Everyday DTrace on OSX: A Guide To Using DTrace for Your Full Application Stack Portland Ballroom 251
Scott Barron (EdgeCase), Chad Humphries (EdgeCase) Have you ever wanted to know why a part of your application is slow? How about how long that query takes? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get this type of information for ruby, rails, and the database server in one place? You can now with DTrace on OSX 10.5. We’ll show you how to best use this tool-chain to debug, profile, and gather more information about your application. Read more.

1:50pm Sunday, 06/01/2008
Building an app in 48 hours – A Rails Rumble Case Study Portland Ballroom 251
Josh Owens (Intridea, Inc/Web 2.0 Show Podcast), Chris Selmer (Intridea, Inc.) So you want to build a Rails app quickly? Competitors in the Rails Rumble had 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a complete application. We’ll take you through the development processes of the winning four-man Tasty Planner team, and compare it with those of the one-man Your Pet Records team. We’ll discuss techniques, short-cuts, helpers, and Rails plugins that helped speed development. Read more.

Justin and I registered for RailsConf just the other day. I’m excited of course. Last year was a great time. I learned a ton… I hadn’t even been using Ruby/Rails that much before then. So I think this year I’ll get even more out of it. And having another team member along with me means we can double the sessions—last year I was often disappointed that I had to choose between two equally decent sounding talks.

I again signed up for the first day of tutorials this year. Last year I ended up sleeping on a bench in O’Hare and therefore missed my first tutorial. I’m hoping on a better flying experience this year.

• Refactoring Your Rails Application
• Developer Testing Tricks

• Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit
• Powering AIR Applications with Rails

4 months, today, until the conf…

One of my favorite talks from RailsConf was by the team behind The Rails Way. Now back from the road trip and settled in, they have updated their site with some more details about one of the ideas they pushed: Controllers should be simple, basic, and generally have a lot less code then most of us use now. Most of your logic should end up in the model.

1. It forces you to write code that more easily reused. Limits your temptation to copy/paste from one controller action to another.
2. Your templates can become more details. @order.total instead of @total (which would have to be mapped to something logic in the controller.)
3. The code is more easily tested. You can programmatically access the results of the methods in your model without having to munge HTML output from a controller.

Their post has all the details and code samples.

Here’s a wrap up of all my posts from RailsConf 2007. (The ones with actual useful substance, that is.)

• DRYing up Views
• Rails 2.0 details from DHH’s Keynote
• Clean Code
• Adding tests to legacy rails apps
• Reading code
• Business of Rails
• Splunk
• Dealing with Designers
• Javascript Fu
• The Rails Way

All in all, it was a fantastic convention. As can be expected, some presentations were better then others. Suggestions for next year include:

1. Better descriptions of the sessions and of the speaker’s experience.
2. Perhaps repeating some sessions at multiple times.
3. Better planning of expected attendance at each session so proper room size could be selected.

There’s a number of talks I didn’t get to see that I really wanted to. In the coming days, I hope to find their presenting materials online to see if there’s anything I can glean.