More impressions and experiences from the second day of RailsConf 2006

• Justin Gehtland had a talk about Rails and AJAX this morning that was promoted specifically in Dave Thomas’ keynote yesterday morning. The announcement of Streamlined was definitely worth the time and the rest of the talk was excellent as well. Slides are available here. Some of my favorite quotes:
  • DHTML and Javascript were cocaine—good but expensive. AJAX is crack… and Rails is the free vial.
  • There’s Javascript in my Ruby… Kind of like a peanut butter cup of EVIL.
• My next two sessions were on DSLs. Steven Hammond and Bill Katz both gave good presentations, but I felt the first was a little application light and the second explanation light. Perhaps this might have been better as an extended length team presentation? On a side note, it was nice to meet Glenn Vanderburg and chat for a few minutes about the non-technical.
• Ezra Zygmuntowicz had an excellent piece on Rails deployment. The scaling is something that none of my current projects need YET, but I’ll definitely be looking into Mongrel and BackgrounDRb.
• One of my highlights today was the session on accessible design given by Jason Kunesh. I don’t think that a large number of the audience were satisfied with the presentation, likely because of things that need to be said on this front are not necessarily comfortable ideas for content developers. This lead to a great offsite with myself, Jason, Peter Krantz from Valtech AB, Jeremy Seitz, and several others. In general, we agree that accessibility is one of the opinions that Rails should hold for its developers and hopefully Justin might be interested in accessibility implementation for Streamlined.
• Mike Clark was back for a discussion about testing. The session was great, with substantial advice for approaching the testing problem, and I’m interested in moving toward some integration testing in my own applications. The only downside for me is that much of the presentation borrowed heavily from the Depot application in Agile Web Development with Rails 2E.
• Nathaniel Talbott spoke about homesteading as it applies to software development. I can’t really do justice to the discussion, so hopefully the presentation shows up online sometime soon. Unfortunately, I heard a number of attendees muttering in the hallways that they were disappointed that he didn’t speak more directly about consulting and project development. On the contrary, Talbott’s presentation had everything to do with life, creativity, and pursuit of goals. If you couldn’t relate the things he said to your profession, you may want to carefully consider whether “Buying the Ticket” is really the right thing for you.
• I’m sure that there are already many good summaries of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote written, so I’ll just hit some highlights. After DHH started with a bit of (well deserved) ego display, he addressed many of the ideas from RailsConf thus far. He maintains that the opinionated method has made Rails what it is today and that this is not the time to start bending to the world. Possibly my favorite quote of the conference: “Indulging in insanity should hurt!”. He further explained his intent to make Rails more RESTful by refocusing on the CRUD. For a bit of excitement, DHH also introduced ActiveResource, which will be a framework for utilizing web services and mentioned the possibility of abstracting ActiveModel as a common base for ActiveResource and ActiveRecord—Interesting things ahead.