Musings of a Trained Monkey: RailsConf2006 DHH keynote...

RailsConf2006 DHH keynote...

Steve Longdo — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:02:00 +0000

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.

"RailsConf2006 DHH keynote..." by Steve Longdo

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 01:58:34 +0000

It is more palatable within the effect of DHH's reality distortion field, but it boils down to framework design. He talked about how Rails will make doing things the "right way" easy and doing things that are "bad" difficult. He said that it should "hurt" to do new work with composite keys, for example, because they are inherently evil unnatural keys.
It sounds a lot better coming from him of course. He also said that if someone hacked in support for it in Rails he wouldn't be completely opposed but it is not something that the core team should waste any effort on. I think he admitted that it might speed adoption in large companies but that isn't a big area of concern for him.

"RailsConf2006 DHH keynote..." by Brandon Smith

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:08:50 +0000

What is the explanation exactly? For lack of composite keys in ActiveRecord?