RailsConf EU, part 2

After watching the Rails speaks C-session, I went to lunch. Got back to see the session on Capistrano. Sadly, it wast most about the new features and not much at all about the basics of Capistrano. If I understood the audience correctly, most were expected something like that.

Next session for the day was Camping: Going of the Rails with Ruby, by Eleanor McHugh. She had a companion with her, but I don't remember his name. Actually, the presentation was really crazy. It was good fun, really crazy, but I'm not sure I actually learned so much. It was fun that she'd included that JRuby runs Camping in her presentation.

Next session was David Black's Database Engineering and Rails, which more or less stated loads of questions and undecided issues regarding databases and Rails. There are many things people aren't talking about, and DB design is one of them. Davids talk was mostly questions and a general idea that we need to do better in this area.

Last session for the day was Ugo Cei's talk about Ruby for Java programmers. As Ugo noted in the beginning, there were no abstracts posted on the schedule, and the title for his talk was slightly confusing because of that. The presentation was about getting Ruby and Java to inter operate, not to compare languages to each other, or learn Java programmers how to code Ruby. As such, I had known this from before but my colleagues didn't, and were pleasantly surprised. The presentation was really good. Ugo did a great job of detailing all different approaches, the pros and cons of each and also showed some demos, including my JRuby Camping. Of course, the demo demon was there, and the RubyGems bug surfaced alot.

Oh, and as a side note, that issue will hopefully soon be fixed. Charles and me talked with Jim Weirich about it yesterday, and we may be close to a solution.

After the days session I went back to my hotel to freshen up a little bit. I then went back to the conference center in time to see the Rails Core Team panel discussion. This was quite interesting, but the question I wanted to have answered didn't make it into the session, since I submitted it to late. A few interesting tidbits of information was given. First, SimplyHelpful made some people afraid there would be div_for-helpers all over the place, giving rise to much overhead in terms of unnecessary CSS classes and ids. This is not the case, since div_for should only be used for special cases where the repetition is apparent. Another interesting issue was the proliferation of globalization and internationalization plugins for Rails. The question was whether the core would some day contain these things. The answer is a clear no, but some things need to be better in the core, for example making strings available to change.

The question I wanted to have answered was if ActiveRecord someday will be refactored or rewritten. There are two reasons I see for doing this; to remove the MySQL-specific assumptions from the AR core, and to make it possible to have Prepared Statements. Alas, I didn't get answers to this.

After that, DHH ended the session by spending 20 minutes ranting about the recent security issue and more interesting; the communities reaction to this issue. His core point is simple: he doesn't owe anyone anything just for downloading and using Rails. If you have contributed to the community or Rails that's another thing entirely; that means you're vested in the framework and entitled to some information. It was really interesting. I hadn't realized how irritated DHH had become by those discussions.

Oh well. Now it's time for Jim Weirich and Why The Lucky Stiff to hold a general session. It's bound to be interesting. More reports later.