[O'Reilly Radar]
by Brady Forrest  Jul 18, 2008  Dopplr, the traveler's social network, has added events. In this initial implementation you have to use one of the supplied URLs. Here are the URLs for the next six O'Reilly conferences. OSCON - http://dplr.it/oscon08 EuroRails - http://dplr.it/eurorailsconf08 Web 2.0 Expo NYC - http://dplr.it/w2exponyc Web 2.0 Expo Europe - http://dplr.it/w2expoeurope Web 2.0 Summit - http://dplr.it/w2summit08 MoneyTech - http://dplr.it/moneytech09 If you... read more

[O'Reilly Radar]
by Allison Randal  Jul 10, 2008  The schedule for RailsConf Europe just went up last week. It's shaping up to be another great conference. A few sessions and tutorials that particularly catch my eye are David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote on Wednesday morning, "Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit" by Neal Ford, "Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR" by Till Vollmer, "From Rails Security... read more

[Chad Fowler's Conference Blog]
by chad  Jul 08, 2008  

We had a great time this year at the RailsConf Community Project Code-Drive. Among other things that happened, Evan, Rich, and I created and released gitjour, which is steadily becoming standard Ruby conference must-have software.

So we thought we’d do it again in Europe. If you have an idea for something you’d like to work on, visit the signup page and list it there. If you don’t have an idea, just show up on the tutorial day with a laptop and an open mind.

Also, don’t miss Early Registration, which ends on July 15 and saves you up to €150.

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[Chad Fowler's Conference Blog]
by chad  Jun 05, 2008  

We just wrapped up RailsConf 2008. A lot has been said about RailsConf elsewhere, so as the program chair I’ll just say “thank you” to the speakers, attendees, co-organizers, sponsors, and everyone else for making it the best conference I’ve ever been to.

A lot of exciting things happened. Among the most exciting to me was the public unveiling of Maglev. I’ve had a version of Maglev on my computer for about a month now, but I haven’t been able to talk about it. Now that it has been announced, most things I know are fair game.

Avi Bryant and I met at the first RubyConf. He’s been a fan and friend of Ruby ever since. He happens to be doing mostly Smalltalk these days, but he’s been following the Ruby and (more recently) Rails communities closely. After that first RubyConf, we reconnected while both attending Dick Gabriel’s pilot MFA in Software Development program at UIUC in early 2003. Avi’s been talking since then about running Ruby on a Smalltalk VM. I’ve even started my own attempt once or twice, based on Avi’s ideas of how it could be done.

Given Avi’s interest in Ruby on Smalltalk and that he also created the mind-bending Seaside web application framework, we invited him to keynote at last year’s RailsConf. It was there, in his message from the future keynote, that he made public his belief that Ruby could benefit from being hosted on a mature, dynamic (Smalltalk) VM.

It was also, as I understand it, from that talk that Gemstone got the idea to run Rails.

The conversations started just after RailsConf last year, but it was only a few short months ago that Avi started work on Maglev. That’s part of what makes it so amazing. He and the engineers at Gemstone have gotten the full Ruby language running on the Gemstone VM in just three months.

RDBMS R.I.P.

Well, not really, but it’s fun to say.

There are a lot of things to like about what Maglev promises. By far the most interesting to me is Gemstone’s persistence engine.

What’s coolest about how Gemstone’s persistence engine works within the context of Maglev is that it doesn’t feel like a persistence engine. It’s just objects. Everything’s just objects.

If you think about it, the average Rails application is a styled set of CRUD operations on top of an object graph. That’s right, and object graph. The fact that most Rails applications are backed by a relational database is a somewhat-necessary annoyance.

So in circumstances where you don’t NEED an RDBMS, why would you want to litter your pristine Ruby objects with SQL and other RDBMS-related work-arounds? If it were possible to simply instantiate objects and not have to think about the underlying storage implementation at all, wouldn’t that be better?

That’s what Gemstone (and, therefore, Maglev) gives you.

There were questions during the demo about ActiveRecord compatibility. To me, building in ActiveRecord compatibility is worse than a waste of time. Sure, there are things in ActiveRecord which would be useful regardless of the storage mechanism. Declarative relationships and validations are examples. But, when you’re dealing with objects in memory, the idea of a :conditions clause with SQL in it is absolutely unnecessary and unappealing.

Fast as hell

Avi and the Gemstone people knew from their understanding of how the VM works that a Ruby implementation on Gemstone would be really fast. They were right. But as I said, the speed of the implementation is secondary to the persistence engine.

That being said, it’s really really fast. On micro-benchmarks, it’s up to 100 times faster than MRI.

As has already been whined about ad nauseam, micro-benchmarks can be misleading. They test very specific parts of the implementation and don’t always give you a picture of what real-world application performance will be like. So, let’s take this approach with the Maglev benchmarks: it’s fast enough. It’s probably a lot faster than MRI. And, we’ve been using MRI for years for real applications.

Good enough. Probably awesome. But at least good enough.

Now is it going to slow down as they start implementing more of the libraries and language features? That’s the conventional wisdom. I say no.

Smalltalk and Ruby are, as Avi has said numerous times, essentially the same language. So the Gemstone VM has been tailor-made for running dynamic language code with closures, continuations, etc. and has been doing it for years. Imagine the process, then, of converting Ruby to Smalltalk. It’s in most cases a fairly straightforward language to language translation.

Where it isn’t as simple as that, Gemstone have a pretty big advantage: they own the VM and they can change it to fit what Ruby needs.

I expect Maglev to get faster as the team starts to spend time on optimization. So far, they’re in the “make it run” phase of the process. Remember, three months in.

Antonio Cangiano also had a look at Maglev recently and has a bit more to say about the specifics of Maglev performance

Ruby Compliance (or “it runs WEBRick!”)

So what’s next for Maglev? As the Gemstone team has said, their next goal is to start running and passing the Ruby specs created by the other Ruby implementers. They hadn’t prioritized this leading up to RailsConf, because, RailsConf being a web development conference, they wanted us all to see WEBRick running.

But, hey, they have WEBRick running! Have you looked at the code for WEBRick? That’s a lot of Ruby.

I’m looking forward to a report on how well the Ruby specs run at this moment. I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised. And the specs will give the team a clear goal to work toward.

So Will I Use This Thing?!

When you don’t NEED an RDBMS (more often than you think) or you need scalable Ruby servers, I think Maglev is going to be an enticing alternative. It’s not going to kill the other implementations. Each implementation has its place. This isn’t a war, after all.

Macruby, JRuby, and IronRuby are for integration. MRI/YARV and Rubinius will compete for the “standard” use cases. Maglev is for big, distributed object stores inside of fast, scalable servers. Think Rails, Adhearsion, or various coordination services running custom protocols on sockets. Don’t run scripts in Maglev. Don’t write desktop apps in Maglev. Just use Maglev to serve tons of requests against billions of objects.

Maglev is good for the Ruby ecosystem just as MRI/YARV, Macruby, JRuby, and IronRuby are good for the Ruby ecosystem. The fact that we (will) have so many alternatives is a good thing.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jun 03, 2008  

Dary praises RailsConf 2008 as passionate and fascinating.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist  Jun 01, 2008  

Nick Laiacona covers the news about GemStone’s new MagLev project

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 31, 2008  

Drew Blas posts this excellent, in-depth summation of Friday night at RailsConf. Blas reports on Charles Nutter’s talk “The Sun you don’t know,” the winners of the Ruby Hero awards, and contributes a thoughtful, detailed exploration of David Heinemeier Hansson’s thought-provoking keynote.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 31, 2008  

Sean Michael Kerner enters this perspective on recent Twitter hiccups and RoR.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 31, 2008  

Paul Krill reports on Microsoft’s demonstration of their new Silveright browser plug-in technology at RailsConf this year.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 31, 2008  

Scott M. Fulton, III examines the ramifications and implications of Twitters recent technical problems.

Two weeks ago, following the rapid spread of rumors that the Twitter service — recently besieged with technical troubles — may be abandoning the Ruby on Rails development platform in building a replacement platform for itself, the company’s co-founder Biz Stone flat out refuted those rumors in a comment to BetaNews.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 30, 2008  

David Simms examines Intridea’s new launch Scalr, which debuted at RailsConf Thursday, May 29.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 30, 2008  

Savio Rodrigues reports on Engin Yard’s Rubinius project which previewed at RailsConf.

What’s interesting is that since Ruby doesn’t really have a specification, it’s difficult to say that platform xyz is not a compatible implementation of a Ruby runtime. In response, Rubinius decided to create a test suite that could help standardize Ruby as a language across the growing number of VM implementations for Ruby.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Avila Reese - PR Contributor  May 30, 2008  

Henry Work reports on the FiveRuns launch– TuneUp, a “social debugging tool for Rails applications.”

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Suzanne Axtell, Communications Gal  Feb 29, 2008  

Once again Chad Fowler and his Ruby Central cohorts have put together an excellent schedule of sessions and tutorials. This probably explains why, like last year, seats are going fast for RailsConf 2008, so sign up while you can.

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[Chad Fowler's Conference Blog]
by chad  Feb 02, 2008  

I’m always looking for ways to get humans together for meaningful (potentially lasting) interactions at our conferences. So we’re trying something new this year during the tutorial day. It happens on the first (or 0th?) day of the conference on purpose: so the work can continue for the rest of the conference. My hope is to bring project owners/committers together with aspiring contributors and bring more people into the fold of projects which need help. Think of it as a room full of code sprints happening all at once. Here’s the description:

Project Owners: Do you have a project you’d like to work with other people on? Maybe it’s an established Open Source project. Maybe it’s a new idea. Come find like-minded developers and spend the day hacking together.

Developers: Are you looking to get involved in an Open Source project but need a bootstrapping session to get you started? Looking for chances to meet other developers and establish collaborative working relationships? Looking to learn by collaborating with others? Come find a project and spend the day sitting side-by-side with one or more of its developers learning the ropes and contributing code.

RailsConf is the largest physical gathering of Ruby and Rails developers internationally. Let’s take advantage of all being in one place at the same time AND take the chance to give something back to the projects and community which we so greatly benefit from.

In the morning, project leaders and representatives will have a chance to make a short pitch for their projects and the work they hope to get done. For the rest of the day, groups will self-organize and write code! Roll up your sleeves and prepare to learn, teach, and most importantly, contribute.

Go to this page and add your project or idea to the list of projects likely to be active in the Code Drive.

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[Loud Thinking by David Heinemeier Hansson]
Jan 29, 2008  

Announcing RailsConf '08 today, I stopped to think about that by the time this conference rolls around, I will have been working on Ruby on Rails for five years. Wow. There are so many memories from this wild ride that it's at once both hard to fathom that it's been so long and yet it feels like I've been doing it forever. Time can be funny like that.

But what pleases me the most is that I still absolutely love working on and with Ruby and Rails. It didn't pass, it wasn't just a phase, it wasn't a run for an exit event. I think that's significant because it means that I, and everyone else still involved with the project, are just as likely to keep at this for another five years or more.

When you do what you love for the sake of itself, the rewards are so much greater than if you just do it for external incentives. For lots of measures of "winning", we've long since won with Ruby on Rails. The impact on the industry, the adoption by thousands of companies and developers, the books, the conferences, and all that jazz. And yet, it doesn't really matter that much in the end. What matters is getting excited about continuing the work.

In light of this, I strongly recommend that you find a vocation in your life where you just really enjoy the act itself. Not just the results, not just the external incentives. The actual work. There's not enough time to spend it doing anything else.

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[Loud Thinking by David Heinemeier Hansson]
Jan 29, 2008  

Announcing RailsConf '08 today, I stopped to think about that by the time this conference rolls around, I will have been working on Ruby on Rails for five years. Wow. There are so many memories from this wild ride that it's at once both hard to fathom that it's been so long and yet it feels like I've been doing it forever. Time can be funny like that.

But what pleases me the most is that I still absolutely love working on and with Ruby and Rails. It didn't pass, it wasn't just a phase, it wasn't a run for an exit event. I think that's significant because it means that I, and everyone else still involved with the project, are just as likely to keep at this for another five years or more.

When you do what you love for the sake of itself, the rewards are so much greater than if you just do it for external incentives. For lots of measures of "winning", we've long since won with Ruby on Rails. The impact on the industry, the adoption by thousands of companies and developers, the books, the conferences, and all that jazz. And yet, it doesn't really matter that much in the end. What matters is getting excited about continuing the work.

In light of this, I strongly recommend that you find a vocation in your life where you just really enjoy the act itself. Not just the results, not just the external incentives. The actual work. There's not enough time to spend it doing anything else.

read more

[Chad Fowler's Conference Blog]
by chad  Jan 28, 2008  

Now available!

Scanning through the videos this morning, I was reminded of what a great time I had at RailsConf. Planning is well underway for RailsConf 2008 (keep your eyes peeled for registration to open soon). An initial batch of proposals have been selected, and I’m already excited about the program this year.

The Rails community is maturing, and the level of proposed content has matured along with it. Expect more advanced content this year from a more experienced (obviously) group of practitioners.

Seeya there!

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[Chad Fowler's Conference Blog]
by chad  Dec 17, 2007  

There were more proposals for RailsConf this year than there were attendees at RubyConf 2006. This means two things:

1. The state of the Rails community has changed significantly in that it has grown and there is a larger subset reaching the expert level.

2. It’s going to take us a while to sort through all of these proposals and make selections. Apologies in advance.

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[Conferences: RailsConf]
by Dawn Applegate  Jul 23, 2007  

This blog entry compares the agenda for the RailsConf stateside and RailsConf Europe:

It looks like RailsConf Europe in Berlin, Germany (17-19 September 2007) is concentrating on Flex

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