Railsconf 2008 Highlights

5 Jun, 2008

I was lucky enough to be at Railsconf 2008 in Portland last weekend (along with Marty, Rob, Trav and Abhi).

Meeting other Ruby/Rails enthusiasts from all over. (Well, all over the US, at least).
Joel Spolsky's opening keynote was hilarious (in a good way). Some other commentators found it low on content, but I thought it had a strong message: usability matters!
Seeing Kent Beck present was fantastic. He had the audience hanging on his every word, as he described how "anything he'd done had taken 20 years to have an impact".
Ezra's talk on Vertebra, his XMPP-based "cloud control" project, was fascinating. What a great abuse of technology!
The JRuby and Rubinius teams are co-operating closely, in a spirit of friendly, respectful rivalry. Particularly notable is their effort to collaborate (with each other, and Matz) on a rigourous set of executable specs for Ruby language.
The upcoming version of Phusion Passenger will support not only Rails applications, but also Rack (and therefore Merb, Sinatra, Camping), and (get this) WSGI (and therefore a bunch of Python frameworks, including Django)!
There are increasingly varied options for deploying Rails apps, including the traditional {Apache,nginx}+{mongrel,thin}, JRuby WARs in a servlet container, Passenger, and the Amazon-EC2-based services like RightScale and Heroku. Heroku's deployment model is pretty damn clever: just "git push".

With 4 streams going on, the talks I got to were naturally out-numbered by those I missed. Some of the ones I really wish I'd seen include:

MagLev: Gemstone's Ruby implementation-in-progress, based on their Smalltalk VM
Scott Chacon on "Using Git" (apparently he went into mind-bending detail of the Git internals)
Justin Gehtland's "Small Things, Loosely Joined, and Written Fast"

Feedback