RailsConf 2007

May 24, 2007 · by Josh Swan

As I stated in my first post, I attended RailsConf for the first time this year. The conference was presented with the help of O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central. I thought they did a really nice job of keeping everything running smoothly. I thought the keynotes were the best part of RailsConf. There were keynotes by David Heinemeier Hansson, Avi Bryant, Ze Frank, Tim Bray, Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski, and Dave Thomas. I found it interesting that many of the keynotes were not on the technical aspects of Rails but more on community and the evolution of software development.

Ze Frank’s keynote wasn’t even related directly to the software development field. It was more about how technology is now allowing people to express their creativity in new ways, such as through internet websites and tools. He talked about how anyone can now be an author and how that has created a huge influx of new creative material to the internet. He said people basically have three options when it comes to the authors of this new content.

1. You can ignore them.
2. You can try to control them.
3. You can shut them down.

I probably enjoyed his keynote the most because it was very, very funny and entertaining but also because it was really deep.
David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote summerized what has happened over the last couple of years with Rails and then discussed where Rails is going with Rails 2.0. He said Rails 2.0 would focus onRESTful principles but would not be hugely different from what we have now. He also mentioned the following items that would be in 2.0 as well.

• Breakpoints will once again be working in Rails and will have some additional features such as the ability to step up and down in the strack.
• HTTP Performance will be improved using caching techniques for static files such as Javascript and CSS files.
• Query caching will be improved behind the scenes.
• There will be a mime type render that can be used in actions to render different view formats including custom ones.
• The environment.rb file will be split up and better organized.
• Migrations will be improved so the type information is not repeated over and over again in a migration.
• HTTP Authentications will be used more for computer API interactions.
• Rails will generate projects assuming they are going to use the MIT license. If you don’t want to use the MIT license for your project you will need to manually change it.
• Some functionality of Rails will be moved out to plugins based on how well it fits in with the Rails 2.0 core. Also, currently deprecated functionality will be removed.

Many of the speakers such as Dave Thomas talked about the importance of creating a great community presence around Rails and improving the image of the Rails community in the eyes of the world. Throughout the conference people were encouraged to donate money to charity, for example. This started with the Charity Tutorial put on by Pragmatic Studio(which I attended and was a great overview of Ruby and Rails). People interaction was reenforced by the speakers and through the Bird of a Feather sessions at the end of each day. People also gathered during the provided lunches for discussions and short coding sessions.
All in all the conference was really interesting and I came away from it with more motivation to take part in the community. I also learned some interesting stuff through the sessions, although I think this is an area that could be improved upon next year. I often found myself in sessions that had content that I already new or was much simpliar than I expected. It would have been nice if the sessions were organized more by level of expertise or a similar rating next year. However, it was still incredible informative and I would highly recommend for others to attend next year. I would also highly recommend for novice Railers to take the Pragmatic Studio’s tutorial if they get the opportunity. It is a great way to quickly get up to speed with the basics of Ruby and Rails.

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