clog

What a day! There were certainly some great talks at Rails Edge on the first day. This all happened during a storm that must have been an act of God. I certainly had no idea what was in store for me once I left to drive home… hopefully others got home OK. I’m just glad my car didn’t float away on me at any point (honestly I’m surprised it didn’t). I was very close to just bunking in the car at some random parking lot overnight. Had I known how bad it was I would have just stayed at the hotel…

Anyway… the #1 highlight I took from day 1 is: “Be Zealous.” There are many other important highlights, but I think this one is the most important. Chad Fowler did a superb job of going over how to produce “quick and clean” (as opposed to quick and dirty) code. It took a strong force of will to get Rails where it is today. It wouldn’t have happened without the strong opinions and determination of the core team. If we’re going to continue to make the world a better place for software development, then we need to stay true to our values. These are mainly MVC, CRUD, constraint-driven development, metaprogramming and domain-specific constructs and more recently REST.

From my perspective, I hope Ruby/Rails developers continue to evangelize for the cause - but I also hope that we can all recognize when we have turned down the wrong path. Too often I’ve heard the excuse of “yeah it’s a bad way to do it, but there are already thousands of applications in production that rely on that.” The end result is that the problem just becomes worse and worse.

No matter how far down the wrong road you’ve gone, turn back.

Maintaining a zealous stance for the Ruby and Rails core values while also being open to questioning our current path will obviously require a delicate balance. The forces may pull in different directions, but developers will need to learn how to walk the line. To quote Dave Thomas’ speech today, “An object is made from a class and a class is a type of object.” Patterns often become cyclical.

Dave Thomas’ speech on metaprogramming really cut to the chase on how frameworks like Rails are built from Ruby and how you can leverage this power for yourself. If you find yourself coding a non-trivial application, then you really should think of domain-specific ways to describe your application. You can do much more than just build an API, your application can (and probably should) consist of it’s own language in many places. The language is built on Ruby (and possibly Rails as well), but is pieced together in sections that are self-describing. If done properly, this will empower you with productive development throughout the product’s life-cycle. It may be that your framework is so good that it will survive future generations.

A passive observer probably would have thought today’s conference was really “Macbook Pro/iPhone Edge.” A slightly more observant person may have thought it was really Java-loves-Rails Edge. A majority of the crowd seemed to consist of people that were either currently Java developers looking into Ruby, or Java developers that have already made the jump. Add a great talk on JRuby into the mix and there’s a lot of Java floating around. I find this amazing considering the disregarding attitude that seemed to come from the Java community towards Ruby and Rails just a couple of years ago. This change is definitely good for both camps though. The number of Java developers swarming towards Ruby is very reminiscent of how C++ developers swarmed to Java circa 1999.

Personally, I never drank the coffee. It’s not that I didn’t think Java was a great technology, I just felt that it only went half way and didn’t really see the point in that. In my mind, if you wanted efficiency - then just use C++. If you wanted productivity and multi-platform functionality, then Perl and PHP really got things done much faster (despite their crappy OO support) - at least as far as web application development goes. A majority of us that started on Rails back in the beta, 1.0/1.1 days were PHP developers that believed in dynamic languages but also believed that there must be a better way.

Whatever the path, we seem to be converging on the same road now and this can only be a good thing.

Even though I don’t really care too much about Java, I was blown away by Justin Gehtland’s presentation on JRuby. This technology really has come far and has the enormous advantage of being able to run all of the bajillion of Java libraries out there in conjunction with Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) code. This technology has developed amazingly fast and I really wonder if this may end up being the Rails platform of choice down the line. It certainly makes the migration from Java to Ruby quite painless.

Marcel Molina quickly went over his “Presenter” concepts and lamented over the state of Rails tempting language options. It is definitely clear that ERB is near the end of it’s life-span in this role.

Both Marcel and Chad reiterated many times about the evils of putting code in your views. I have recently felt a little over-zealous about all of the times I’ve gone batty about ActiveRecord calls that are in a view. I haven’t even gotten to where I try thump the no-code-in-view philosophy yet. I definitely feel encouraged that this seems to be the perspective of the core team. I’ll also remember that being zealous is generally good…

Ezra Zygmuntowicz (man that’s a tongue twister) proved that stable extreme-volume rails environments are indeed a reality. His discussion on Xen was excellent. In short, the platform of choice is: Linux (via Xen) + Nginx + mongrel + monit. The swiftiply mongrel patch to mongrel is now stable and can greatly increase your throughput. If you don’t know these technologies yet, you owe it to yourself to get to know them.

Last but not least, Mike Mangino gave another great talk on “RESTful” Rails development. Simply helpful was covered, along with changes that are going into Edge Rails - to be Released with Rails 2.0. After talking over REST concepts with the other developers and listening to Mike’s speech, I walked away convinced that REST is indeed the way to go.

I’m looking forward to Day 2, provided that I can swim my way down there!