Oct 25

RubyConf 2006 ended last Sunday night, and then I got a pretty good cold. Better late than never, here is a list of my highlights from RubyConf.

The History of Ruby

A very funny presentation by Masayoshi Takahashi. A great way to open the conference.

Iron Mongrel: Fuzzing, Auditing, Thrashing, Risk and The Ways Of Mongrel Destruction

Zed Shaw does it again. Great coverage of his fuzzing library rfuzz. This is going to be a great addition to testing applications, and maybe one day, even the Ruby interpreter.

Radiant — Content Managment Simplified

As you may or may not know, pmade inc. runs Radiant so I was especially excited about John W. Long's presentation. It was nice to learn about some of the internal workings of Radiant and to hear more about its future. I really look forward to seeing this product mature.

Leveraging Mac OS X from Ruby

OK, this one was huge. If you didn't make it to RubyConf you missed out on seeing a ton of shiny Mac Books. I'd guess that 90% of the attendees were using Apple portables. But when Laurent Sansonetti got up to talk about the RubyOSA project, even the Windoze guys had to ooh and awe. What a great presentation. He started with a few slides showing off AppleScript and older Ruby bridges for AppleEvents. Then on to a few lines of RubyOSA, and right into a live IRB session. He controlled iTunes with just a few lines in IRB. Wow!

He also showed off the RubyCocoa project by demonstrating a small Ruby program in Xcode that presented an alternative interface for iTunes that displays playlists and allows you to control iTunes. Very awesome stuff.

Better still, Apple is supporting these projects, and plans on including them with Leopard. But you can play with them today. Go check out RubyOSA and share your creations.

Streamlined: A Framework for Data-centric Web Applications

If you've had a chance to play with Streamlined then you've undoubtedly been impressed with it. It's nice to see it alive and well. Look forward to a shiny new release around Christmas.

I cornered Justin Gehtland in the hallway and asked him about Streamlined and support for nested controllers. Yes, you heard correctly, I know it's taboo but you'll have to forgive me for wanting better organization and less code in one file. Yes, I use nested controllers in production apps, and if you do as well, Justin has some good news. It looks like Streamlined will support that model, hopefully by Christmas too.

YARV: on Rails?

SASADA Koichi gave a pretty interesting and technical presentation on YARV. He also corrected us English speaking nerds on Japanese family and given names. YARV is looking good, and he even showed us a rails app running under YARV. Personally, I think increasing Ruby's performance is very important. It might be fast enough for things like rails apps, but doing real production back-office type work with it can be painfully slow. Of course, I'll eat the performance costs for such a great language to develop in, but if Ruby 2.0 comes out with YARV I will be the first to do a little dance.

Google Summer of Code Student Talks

Some pretty interesting stuff here. I especially liked the talk about getting the Ruby interpreter to run on cell phones.

Random Presentations

Due to a cancelation a group of speakers were given the chance to perform 5 minute presentations. If you're looking for a cafe nearby that has free Wi-Fi, look no further than a new Ruby on Rails app called Community Wifi Cafe Listings.

Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto Roundtable

This was a lot of fun. Matz made us all laugh and clap a bunch of times, and he even announced that Ruby 1.9.1 would be out Christmas 2007. He's also kicking off a new system for making recommendations for what shouldbe included in Ruby 2.0. If you want to contribute, start by reading the old RCRchives and be patient for the announcement on how submissions are going to work going forward.

IRC

Finally, a few of us got together and talked about IRC. Unfortunately has gone downhill. We're going to try yet another open IRC channel, #rubyists on irc.freenode.net. Hopefully we won't have to lock that channel down.

The RubyConf 2006 Logo

A big thanks to Bruce Williams for letting everyone use the RubyConf 2006 logo.