The Rails Edge Conference in Denver - Day 3

Daniel Wanja — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 08:38:00 +0000

I am a bit late (20minutes) to the conference as I had an iChat with my nieces that turned 3 today.

THE RAILS TIMES by Mike Clark and Bruce Williams

So I seems I haven’t missed to much so far. Mike Clark and Bruce Williams are presenting what’s new in Rails. They call it it “THE RAILS TIMES”, and the first slide is a news paper front page.

HABTM Ousted in favor of Rich Models using has_many :through.
Many deprecations telling you how to prepare for Rails 2.0.
Routes get named.
Extra: Ruby generates javascript. page[:tags].reload # reload _tags.rhtml partial.
Serial(ization) Killers At Large: YARML, XML, JSON
RSS is the next big thing: render_rss_feed_for(@people, options)
The future is CRUD: ruby script/generate scaffold_resource article. map.resources :articles
Conventions Flourish: see simply_helpful. form_for @person do end
BULLTIN: Apps respond-to Clients: respond_to do |format| format.html, format.js, format.xml, format.yaml. Custom format can also be added.
CORBA? RMI? No, ActiveResource!: class Person < ActiveResource::Base
Security Alert! Parameter Filtering – filter_parameter_logging :password, :login, :user
Installation Typo Triggers Global App Meltdown: rake rails:freeze:gems
Manking Attacked by Mongrel: gem install mongrel
Tomorrow’s Edition? : Rails 2.0? REST?

The Meaning of CRUD by Chad Fowler

This is an awsome talk where Chad is going into the impact that a RESTFul approach has on your development and how to write your application using the new named routes and RESTfull controllers.

Streamlined by Justin Gehtland
Justin goes through many of the options on how to manipulate declaratively a Streamlined driven UI.

Road map:

0.0.6 new look (soon)
0.0.7 control types for fields
0.0.8 plugin instead of generator
0.1 99% rcov, compatibility

Features to look for

visual configuration
declarative tabbed ui 0.0.8?
generated columns sortable
context specific ui (different for list, show , edit…)
rich text editor (TinyMCE)

Deployment by James Duncan Davidson

Start Early deploying your applications. Find all the “interesting” deployment problems up front. You’ll know how to do it when the times comes. You’ll get into the deployment rhythm.

How to do it: not using WEBrick, CGI, FastCGI…but proxy to Mongrel (ya-huh!). Front End use Apache, Lighttpd, Pound, Pen, or hardware load balancer. Use Capistrano. The Golden Path assumes Capistrano, Unix (NOT Windows), subversion. Apache 2.2.x (myproxy balance), Ruby Termios Library, MySQL 5. Duncan then went on to a live demo, connected to his Subversion repository in Portland using the Hotels network deploying to an EC2 (Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud) . So pretty gutsy demo but the demo went on pretty well.

CONFERENCE CONCLUSION!
Awesome conference, well worth the money. Not only was it well organized but the talks where just loaded of useful information. Thanks to all the presenters!

OnRails.org: The Rails Edge Conference in Denver - Day 3

The Rails Edge Conference in Denver - Day 3