O'Reilly Media RailsConf

Ruby on Rails has been around for five years and three major versions, and while many small things have changed, the major principles are still the same. In this talk from the 2009 RailsConf, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, lists some of the things that failed to "kill" Rails, the philosophy and details of the upcoming Rails 3 release, and the key to productivity in software development.

Jeremy Kemper, one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails framework, talks about various techniques to improve performance in this presentation at the O'Reilly European Rails Conference. This is a must-listen presentation for anyone who is interested in optimizing the performance of Rails-based web applications.

Legacy software is usually seen as a burden, but in this talk from RailsConf Europe, David Heinemeier Hansson flips that idea on its head. In order to recognize bad software, you have to become a better developer, so if your old code is "legacy", that means you have progressed. Legacy should be a badge of honor. After discussing the concept of legacy code in general terms, Heinemeier Hansson does some detailed analysis of his own old Rails code.

In this Q&A session the Rails core team discuss trends in the Rails community, the challenge of SproutCore, framework competition, and how to pick a Ruby implementation. Along with insights into the team's personal technology interests and the folly of micro-optimisation, the dangers of over abstraction and other areas are explored.

Rails 2 has a lot of things to feel happy about. Jeremy Kemper, one of the earliest and one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails framework, gives a detailed explanation of the new features in Rails 2.0 and 2.1.

Other frameworks have cloned features of Rails. But according to its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, the Rails philosophy of convention over configuration and abstracting the user from making choices, continues to give its developer community a competitive advantage. The only parallel that can compete will have to be something that is significantly better than Rails which, although it is a possibility, doesn't seem very likely.

If you think that Sun Microsystems is that Java company, then you've a lot of news to catch up on. Charles Nutter, co-lead on the JRuby project at Sun, gives a quick round-up of a plethora of initiatives that Sun is working on, for the individual open source developer and the little start-up guy, besides bringing Ruby to the enterprise.

Joel Spolsky is a highly revered software pundit, an eminent author, the host of one of the most widely read blogs, the co-founder of New York based FogCreek Software, and a witty and intelligent person to listen to. He believes that the three key ingredients that make great software are: making users happy, obsessing over aesthetics, and observing culture code. In elaborating these ideas with plenty of examples, he doesn't spare his wonderful sense of humor.

Relating anecdotes from the past, Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit, reflects back on the impact his ideas have had in the last 20 years, especially with respect to the history of Test Driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, and Extreme Programming (XP). According to him, good ideas take about that much time to mature and come to fruition.

Although Java remains one of the world's most popular development platforms, Ruby and Rails are picking up on a steep upward curve. Why then, should Sun shower its love on Ruby? In this keynote presentation, Tim Bray, the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, covers a broad range of topics such as Sun's interest in promoting Ruby, the case for JRuby in the enterprise, the areas Ruby needs to improve on, features that may be good extensions to the Rails framework and Sun's business model of making all its products open-source.