Musings of a Trained Monkey

David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote was rather, um CRUD-dy :-)

It mainly focused on the importance of modelling the application domain as well as the relationships between the models, at the correct level of abstraction/encapsulation. This of course is nothing new to anyone who has been doing software development for a while.

The new part comes in with using all of the HTTP "verbs" (POST,GET,PUT,DESTROY) in Rails as a default convention. So for CRUD; Create=POST, Read=GET, Update=PUT, and Delete=DESTROY. Using this convention it is possible to build a higher level abstraction on top, tentatively called ActiveResource. He also discussed the use of respond_to, the HTTP Accept Headers, and even extensions to handle multiple input and output types from a single controller. So the same code that handles a HTML page could be reused as a webservice for example, or for returning a JavaScript representation. Definitely an area to keep an eye on.

All in all he is an excellent presenter. He definitely has a charisma that holds your attention in person. Outside of the material in his presentation he explained some of the reasons why things are the way they are in Rails. In particular the intentionally lackluster support for composite primary keys. Hearing this in person is much more effective than reading about it on a mailing list.

The wifi at this venue is a bit wonky so I haven't been able to post as much as I thought I would. Ran into some more people from Iowa at the conference. I think there are five of us just from Des Moines. Hopefully the Rails will be laid down from Chicago to Des Moines soon!

Matt's BBC Catalogue session was great. He seemed like one of the more accomplished speakers at the event. Ezra's deployment talk was extremely crowded! Deployment difficulty seems to be a common theme at the conference. Shared hosting is really taking a beating from the speakers here.

My phone's camera/memory card decided to eat almost all the photos I have taken so far. Which is a bummer, I really wanted to post a picture of the guy wearing the "acts_as_cool" shirt...

UPDATE: Jason Kunesh's talk which dealt with Accessibility/Usability was surprisingly interesting to me. I've been aware of 508a guidelines, but having something as simple as a live demonstration of a screen reader really brings home how different a web experience is for someone using the screen reader. The statistics he presented for blindness by 2020 were alarming.

Mike Clark's testing session was a let down, mostly because the information level was fairly basic, then again I've been following information from him about testing and automation for a long time.

Very interesting proceedings thus far. I've spotted lots of "famous" rails bloggers spotted in the flesh. Highlight so far would have to be seeing someone play an AC/DC song ('You shook me') on an accordian.

More to come!

UPDATE 5:15ish: Wow! There are lots of awesome people here. Very intelligent questions in the sessions. Jim Freeze's Asterisk presentation was educational for me as I have no background in telecommunications software at all. Also because Martin Fowler, DHH, and Nicolas Seckar (no site?) were sitting right next to me! Seeing their reactions to some of the material was funny.
Stefan Kaes's optimization techniques & tools session yielded some interesting tips for performance tuning. I sat at a table with Jarkko Laine and Matt Biddulph. Two guys that have done a lot to get Rails recognized as a serious alternative to Java/.Net. Matt was very interesting to talk to, looking forward to his presentation on the work he did for the BBC tomorrow.