RailsConf: Day 2
Day two of the European Rails Conference kicked-off with the main man himself, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). The creator of Rails talked on how the framework and community has changed over the last three years from the position of the young upstart, who was at first laughed at and ignored but is now taken seriously as a real alternative for big business.
This reiterated a theme for the whole conference about how Rails is now being considered and used in more and more Global 1000 companies. I was talking to a guy from IBM who was saying how he has been successful in pushing the Rails platform for internal projects within the company. Both IBM and Sun were main sponsors of the conference, which tells us how these big companies are sitting up and paying attention.
DHH then proceeded to demonstrate some of the new features and refinements in the soon to be released version 2.0 of Rails. A nice overview of this can be found over here.
Making Rails More Artificially Intelligent
The first session of the day started with an interesting talk from the guys at http://bee.com.es on how to use algorithms to solve 'intelligent' problems and make your applications smarter. The talk focussed on two key areas bayesian networks and genetic algorithms. It's a fascinating field and is growing ever more important as it provides methods that help make sense of the ever increasing volume of information on the web, such as improving search results, filtering spam and creating personalised suggestions (such as products or music of interest).
Full Text Search with Ferret
Programmers seem to love giving their creations odd and sometimes silly names, such as Ferret. Ferret is actually the search engine we use to provide the onsite search capability of our websites, so there could be a vaguely tangible link with searching and 'ferreting' through a site... Anyway, this talk was on some of the more unknown/advanced features of the search engine. There were some useful tips that will be working their way into our implementation soon.
Rubinius - Improving the Ruby Ecosystem
Rubinius is a brand new code-base for the Ruby language. Most of the core functionality is actually written in Ruby, so it will be possible to easily go in and directly modify the core functionality. New features like modern memory management and garbage collection mechanisms should provide significant performance improvements. Applications can also be compiled into packages in a similar way to Java to enable easier distribution and productisation.
One concern is that the Ruby platform will become splintered with two different versions of Ruby, however the Rubinius project assures us it will keep full compatibility with the original Ruby. An interesting note is that Rubinius has a complete RSpec test suite based upon the original Ruby functionality. The same test suite is also used by JRuby thus following the same standard specification.
Scaling a Rails Application
The final session of the day was by one of the developers behind the hugely popular Twitter. Whilst not something directly affecting us at the moment, it was interesting to gain some insight into their system. Unfortunately the presentation wasn't as prepared as it should had been and contained a few mistakes.
One interesting point was the announcement that Twitter will be open-sourcing a daemon component called Starling that they use to offload long-running processes to maintain browser responsiveness for the client.
Keynote Speeches
There were two keynote speeches worth mentioning, the first by Dr Roy Fielding called “The Rest of REST” which dealt with using REST as an architecture of developing modern web applications. Roy was one of the original authors of the HTTP protocal - something the entire internet is now reliant upon. Although rather academically orientated it was interesting to hear some of the history behind such a core component of the internet.
The last keynote was a talk by Craig McClanahan from Sun. Craig is the creator of the original mega Java framework, Struts. Being a popular speaker within Java circles he gave a very energetic talk on how he has enjoyed the power and productivity gains from using Rails, even so far as admitting that it feels painful having to go back into Java - quite an admission from a hard-core Java guru!
Photo credits Duncan Davidson and Patrick Lenz.
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