RailsConf Europe 2007 Day One

Day one of the RailsConf Europe is over (for me anyway), and so here’s my summary of what I’ve seen and heard today.

It all really started yesterday with Dave Thomas’ keynote on “The Art of Rails”. The talk was inspiring. It wasn’t really any new stuff, basically a nice speech with visuals about what the Pragmatic Programmers have already written about. The comparison to art sounds far-stretched for a lot of people, and it might even be. Still, there’s a lot to learn from art that can be applied to software development. Casper Fabricius published a nice summary.

The morning keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson was okay. It wasn’t great. It pretty much summed up all the neat new features of Rails 2.0. There’s another nice summary over at the blog of Casper Fabricius.

My sessions schedule started out with Benjamin Krause’s “Caching in Multi-Language Environments.” He actually patched the REST-routing in Rails to support the content language as a parameter for a resource URI, e.g. /movies/231.html.de. Neat stuff. He also implemented a language-based fragment cache using memcached. Both will be available later this week on his blog.

Next up was Dr. Nic’s talk on meta-programming with Ruby and Rails. My word, I love his Australian accent. His talk was highly entertaining, I was laughing a lot. But it was also inspiring. He’s very encouraging about trying out the meta-programming features of Ruby and doing some weird, funny and useful stuff with it. He already put up his slides for your viewing pleasure.

The afternoon was filled with the wondrous joys of JRuby and Rubinius, held by their respective maintainers Charles Nutter, Thomas E Enebo and Evan Phoenix on both of which I’m hooked now. Especially Rubinius impressed me a lot.

Roy Fielding’s talk on REST was something I was really looking forward too, but it turned out to be more of a summary of his dissertation. The part on REST was good, but he spent an awful lot of time telling history and the theories behind REST.

The smaller diamond-sponsor keynotes by Jonathan Siegel of ELC Tech and Craig McClanahan were short, but pretty good I’d say.

In all, the day was pretty good, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Bratwurst On Rails

I can safely say that “Bratwurst On Rails” was a success. A lot of people showed up at the Kalkscheune, ate Bratwurst and had a good time.