metal&gin | (a weblog by craig t mackenzie)

The second day of RailsConf was long… very long.

Chad Fowler’s Intro

The day kicked off with chad fowler opening the keynote with an important message: “Everyone thinks we are a bunch of arrogant bastards.” People laughed at this at first, but as he kept talking what he was saying become apparent, as our community grows more and more of us are becoming wealthy off the back of rails it becomes important to prove to the rest of the world that we can make a difference.

It was an important message, there are nearly 2000 people at RailsConf and if we each donated $100 to the Pragmatic Studio’s Charity of Choice we can prove to people that we can change the world.

Or something.

DHH’s Keynote

David’s keynote was good, the focus was on Rails 2, recapping the features introducing some minor new features, and indicating which features are going to be removed.

One of the things he highlighted which definitely got me excited was some further clarification on and enhancements to the way that RESTful routing works, my biggest gripe with that was admin/backend routing and implementing REST in all situation.

This has been cleaned up a lot and you can now namespace your RESTful routes / resources.

Another neat thing was the respond_to stuff, it now seems (i might be wrong) that this has become transparent in detecting and routing mime types. which is nice.

ActiveResource looks sweet. It’s going to be replacing ActiveWebService and is completely focused on consuming REST interfaces. REST is one of the main focuses of Rails 2, it’s the new opinion, if you’re going to be devleoping an app, it should be REST routed, APIs should be based on REST. Good opinions.

respond_to :voice

This was the first session of the day, at it fucking rocked.

It was an introduction to using the Asterisk PBX with rails, using a new plugin called Telegraph.

I looked into Asterisk a while ago, and the AGI config files are just horrible, hundreds of lines of extraneous repetitive code. nasty.

Telegraph takes these AGI/AMI config files and wraps them in clean MVC ruby code. The thing that really got me going was the possibilities, the guy gave some demo’s and it’s really exciting. The general idea is that you can take your rails app and another interface for your users to interact with it in. Voice, using Asterisk and Telegraph will allow you to have your app call out to people, have people call in, consume data over the phone, maintain session data between the web and the phone network (super sweet).

I really cant wait to get going with it.

Doing Rest Right

I really really wanted this to be good. It wasn’t. Although it was insightful, and gave some brain food to chew over, it was a bit high-level and philosophical. I left early.

Apollo

This talk was kinda good, although not really Rails-centric, it was a nice introduction to the new Adobe cross-platform runtime for Flash/Flex/HTML/JS/PDF apps.

The really interesting thing is that all of the separate technologies supported inside of the runtime are treated as first class citizens with a common cross technology DOM to use.

You could basically have an Apollo app with an HTML viewer, and Flex/Flash component side by side, and cross-script between the two of them with a common DOM. Very neat.

Flex in general is something that I really need to get into (again)

Avi Bryant’s Keynote

Avi Bryant has been in and out of the Ruby community for a while, he’s a smalltalk advocate that works on the seaside project.

His talk was focused on the future of ruby, performance etc.

It was kinda good, a prompt to think of the future of our language. meh.

Ze Frank’s Keynote

Ze Frank, simply put is the fucking funniest thing ever. His keynote was more of a stand up comedy routine, with slides. The topic was accelerating anxiety.

I really can’t explain how good it was, you just have to google some of the stuff this guy has done. It was the perfect end to the day.