has_many :thoughts

Ezra Zygmuntowicz, creator of Merb, gave a eye-opening talk about Ruby performance and why the stigma that “Ruby is slow” led him to prove everyone wrong in creating Merb.

Quick overview (pros):

• Benchmarking was discussed, using Ruby Benchmark library and the Ruby-Profile gem/lib. I liked how he has a profile method setup in Merb (and can be ported out to any app) to do quick profiling of blocks of code. As well as the significance of profiling/benchmarking while you develop.
• The idea of “Less meta-programming tricks” and keeping things simple.
• Benchmarking of options hash as arguments for methods and Symbol.to_proc, amongst others Ezra demonstrated.

Above all, what stuck with me the most was his explanation of why he created Merb, for speed and less framework code. Ezra proclaimed that Rails has been great at extending new ideas into the development community. As well as pushing Ruby into the mainstream.

As far as Merb goes I’ve learned that its great for file uploading and gateway stream buffering. Example: Merb can initiate an authenticated stream with S3, then push the data through Merb to the end client.

Merb is also has a feature called PartControllers. PartControllers are apparently smaller Rails-ish controller classes that do not handle params, sessions or requests and instead provide actions for smaller widgets or controller-in-controller. Example: You would like to have a small RSS Feed reader (PartController) within a view initiated from your StoreController, etc…

To sum it all up, Merb allows you to implement Ruby web applications, generally like Rails, but without being forced idioms and conventions. Not just that, but Merb is completely Rspec’d and provides built-in profiling!!!

BLURP

Whoda thunk? You can make games with Ruby?

I had no idea until I attended this talk by Andrea O. K. Wright. She discussed the various Ruby libraries and C wrappers that are utilized to create games with Ruby. Why not use the prettiest language for games?

The games developed so far are… pretty basic. AOK didn’t know of any commercial games out there using Ruby. But nonetheless, there are some pretty impressive free games and a variety of incredible proof-of-concepts out there.

I have yet to determine if there is a practical reason to be interested in game development with Ruby for our business. But this chat was still intersting to hear.

• Shattered Ruby
• Ogre.rb
• GOSU
• RubyGame

Today is the one day RubyEast conference out here in suburban Philadelphia. I’ll do my best to post summaries of the various talks I attend.

The conference seems to be well attended. Not as well as it could be, but still at least 150 people, perhaps.

The keynote talk is underway now: a presentation about the future of Ruby by Hal Fulton. Hal is the author of The Ruby Way and claims to be one of the first five people in the United States to learn Ruby.

I’m looking forward to Ruby East this Friday. Thanks to Chariot for organizing this. Here’s my pics from the various talks:

• 10:15am – 11:15am
  Andrea O.K. Wright – High Art on Top of Low-Level APIs: Building Games with Ruby
  AOK is A-OK; I want to see her speak!

• 11:30am – 12:30pm
  Amy Hoy – How Rails Works Inside & Out
  Again, choosing because of the speaker here.

• 1:15pm – 2:15pm
  Gregory Brown & Michael Milner – Ruby Reports, Beyond 1.0
  I have a marketing interest so I’d love to learn about reporting options with rails.

• 2:30pm – 3:30pm
  Obie Fernandez – Rails and ActiveRecord
  The Obie Fernandez? I’m in.

• 3:45pm – 4:45pm
  Mike Mangino – Using Testing and Mocking to Improve your Code
  Testing is the shit. Excited for this one.

Honestly, the selections aren’t 100% thrilling. But any time a bunch of Rubyists get together, I’m all over it so it should be a good time.