RailsConf Europe 2008 Schedule

Below are the confirmed and scheduled talks at RailsConf Europe (schedule subject to change).

Customize Your Own Schedule

Create your own RailsConf Europe schedule using the personal scheduler function. Mark the tutorials, sessions, and keynotes you want to attend by clicking on the star next to each listing. Then click on "personal schedule" at the top of the page and get your own customized schedule generated.

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To rate the sessions you attend go to any session detail page or topic listing page and click on "Rate this session" just below the session title. If you aren’t already logged into Expectnation, you will be prompted for your email address and password.

Saal Maritim A
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10:45 Hacking the Mid-End: Unobtrusive Scripting and Advanced UI Techniques in Rails Michael Bleigh (Intridea), Chris Selmer (Intridea, Inc.)
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11:35 Enterprise CRM on Rails: 700 Migrations and Still Counting Stefan Kaes (Stefan Kaes - IT-Consulting und Systemsoftwareentwicklung), David Anderson (Folklogic.com), Larry Baltz (Folklogic.com)
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13:40 How the Global Open Source Census Works Rod Cope (OpenLogic, inc.)
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14:30 Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR Till Vollmer (MindMeister/Codemart GmbH)
15:20 TBC
Saal Maritim B
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10:45 When to Tell Your Kids About Presentation Caching Matthew Deiters (Independent)
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11:35 The One-Two Punch: jQuery with Rails Yehuda Katz (EngineYard)
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13:40 Intellectual Scalability - Solving a Large Problem With Multiple Cooperating Rails Apps Frederick Cheung (Texperts), Paul Butcher (Texperts)
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14:30 Scaffolding an Application from schema.rb Tomaso Minelli (University of Padua)
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15:20 Security on Rails Jonathan Weiss (Peritor GmbH)
Saal Maritim C
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11:35 Rails Software Metrics Roderick van Domburg (Nedforce)
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13:40 Juggernaut : Realtime Rails Alex MacCaw (Made by Many), Stuart Eccles (Made By Many Limited)
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14:30 Rails with an Accent - Organising a Regional Conference Alan Francis (Cardboard Software), Paul Wilson (Mere Complexities)
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15:20 Object Databases with Ruby on Rails Markus Franz (Sugoma KG)
Salon 2
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10:45 JRuby: The Other Red Meat Thomas Enebo (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
11:35 TBC
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13:40 Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails Fernando Castano (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
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14:30 Rubinius 1.0 Wilson Bilkovich (Engine Yard)
15:20 TBC
Salon 4
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10:45 EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing Jonathan Dahl (Tumblon)
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11:35 Debugging & Testing the Web Tier Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks)
8:30 Welcome Coffee
Room: Saal Foyer
10:15 AM Break
Room: Saal Foyer
16:05 Break
Room: Saal Foyer
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9:00 Plenary
Room: Saal Maritim ABC
Welcome David A. Black (Ruby Central, Inc.)
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Keynote David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
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16:45 Plenary
Room: Saal Maritim ABC
Meet the Sun You Don't Know Nick Sieger (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
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Keynote Jeremy Kemper (37signals)
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19:30 BoFs
Room: Saal Maritim ABC
Wednesday Birds of a Feather Sessions (BoFs)
12:20 Lunch
Room: Exhibit Hall
10:45–11:30 (45m) General
Hacking the Mid-End: Unobtrusive Scripting and Advanced UI Techniques in Rails
Michael Bleigh (Intridea) et al
A discussion of the growing development area that lies in between the front and back ends of web applications using real code examples of advanced user interface design and construction. From Lowpro behaviors to block-accepting helpers and interface abstraction, the field for ‘Mid-End’ developers is coming into its own right.
11:35–12:20 (45m) General
Enterprise CRM on Rails: 700 Migrations and Still Counting
Stefan Kaes (Stefan Kaes - IT-Consulting und Systemsoftwareentwicklung) et al
Replacing an old system, which has been in use for several years, is never an easy task. In our talk we will show you how we used Rails and other open source technologies to build a new system which, in our view, surpasses the old system in both functionality and usability.
13:40–14:25 (45m) General
How the Global Open Source Census Works
Rod Cope (OpenLogic, inc.)
The Open Source Census (osscensus.org) is a global community initiative to show that open source above the operating system level is widely adopted throughout the world and is deployed in mission-critical settings by large enterprises. Come see how this modern, multi-tiered, REST-based client and web application is securely implemented through a combination of Rails, Ruby, JRuby, and PHP.
14:30–15:15 (45m) General
Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR
Till Vollmer (MindMeister/Codemart GmbH)
Online applications have one major drawback when you are offline: They simply do not work. With Google Gears / AIR it is possible to add offline support to your application and make it fully functional while in the plane or somewhere in the wild. This is demonstrated with the mind mapping application "MindMeister".
15:20–16:05 (45m)
Session
To be confirmed
10:45–11:30 (45m) General
When to Tell Your Kids About Presentation Caching
Matthew Deiters (Independent)
Page and Fragment caching are great but did you know typically 80% of a responses time is on network communication? This will be an exploration of all the dirty details of caching your app's personal bits in the client browser. We'll look at what Rails provides, how it works and what you can additionally do to reduce response times and load on your application with little effort.
11:35–12:20 (45m) General
The One-Two Punch: jQuery with Rails
Yehuda Katz (EngineYard)
jQuery is a Rapid-Development JavaScript Library. Rails is a Rapid-Development server-side framework. Together, they're a Rapid-Development powerhouse. Learn how to leverage jQuery to build tight, maintainable Ajax applications.
13:40–14:25 (45m) General
Intellectual Scalability - Solving a Large Problem With Multiple Cooperating Rails Apps
Frederick Cheung (Texperts) et al
Rails app getting too large? Unit tests taking too long to run? Lost in a maze of twisty little model classes, all alike? In this presentation, we'll discuss how you can factor a single large application into multiple co-operating Rails apps and yet have them appear to the user as a single coherent whole.
14:30–15:15 (45m) General
Scaffolding an Application from schema.rb
Tomaso Minelli (University of Padua)
Using the convention-over-configuration paradigma to create the scaffolding of an application in a few seconds from the database structure, i.e. generate migrations, models (including relations), controllers, streamlined configuration modules and template starting the schema.rb.
15:20–16:05 (45m) General
Security on Rails
Jonathan Weiss (Peritor GmbH)
This talk will focus on the security of the Ruby on Rails Web Framework. Some do’s and don’ts will be presented along with security best practices for common attacks like session fixation, XSS, SQL injection, and deployment weaknesses.
10:45–11:30 (45m) General
Adding Semantic Markup to Your Rails Application with DBpedia and ActiveRDF
Rob Lee (Rattle Research )
In this session we'll look at how we can use DBpedia and ActiveRDF to add semantic markup to web applications. ActiveRDF provides an object relational mapping system for RDF documents. DBpedia is an RDF version of Wikipedia, with around 218 million entities represented as RDF, providing a comprehensive dataset.
11:35–12:20 (45m) General
Rails Software Metrics
Roderick van Domburg (Nedforce)
Using computer science, you can measure application quality based on an assortment of criteria - likewise for Ruby on Rails applications. Learn about gems and methods for measuring code coverage, cyclomatic complexity, coupling, cohesion, and how you can use them to improve your Ruby on Rails applications.
13:40–14:25 (45m) General
Juggernaut : Realtime Rails
Alex MacCaw (Made by Many) et al
Juggernaut offers a lightweight and flexible solution to server push using a Flash client to provide real-time HTML and JavaScript updates to connected clients. This talk will detail the simplest ways to begin using Juggernaut to provide some simple real-time updates for a chat application.
14:30–15:15 (45m) General
Rails with an Accent - Organising a Regional Conference
Alan Francis (Cardboard Software) et al
This year, I co-organised Scotland on Rails - the first regional Ruby/Rails conference in the UK. We attracted 20 speakers from all over the world - both local developers, and more famous names (including Koz, Jim Weirich, Bruce Williams, and David A Black) and, at time of writing roughly 70 attendees. This session will cover some of the good, bad and ugly of running a regional conference.
15:20–16:05 (45m) General
Object Databases with Ruby on Rails
Markus Franz (Sugoma KG)
Ruby on Rails is cool stuff for web services and other business apps. This session shows how to make RoR go well with object oriented databases.
10:45–11:30 (45m) Products & Services
JRuby: The Other Red Meat
Thomas Enebo (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
JRuby enables a better Rails experience through a number of double plus good features. By supporting Native Threads, JRuby can spawn multiple runtimes and also trivially spawn background jobs. By having access to large numbers of Java libraries, you can easily access virtually any technology known to mankind.
11:35–12:20 (45m)
Session
To be confirmed
13:40–14:25 (45m) Products & Services
Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails
Fernando Castano (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
This session will focus on the performance lessons learned during the development of a developer collaboration web application.
14:30–15:15 (45m) Products & Services
Rubinius 1.0
Wilson Bilkovich (Engine Yard)
Rubinius is an execution environment for Ruby code. This talk will outline what is included in the 1.0 release, how it got there, and what the future holds. Questions (technical and otherwise) are welcome.
15:20–16:05 (45m)
Session
To be confirmed
10:45–11:30 (45m) General
EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing
Jonathan Dahl (Tumblon)
MapReduce is the distributed processing algorithm that powers Google. EC2 offers on-demand computing. MapReduce can be implemented using Ruby and EC2, providing processing power to Rails applications for a variety of purposes. This talk will cover MapReduce, a Ruby-based implementation using EC2, and how your Rails application may or may not benefit from MapReduce.
11:35–12:20 (45m) General
Debugging & Testing the Web Tier
Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks)
As our applications have spilled from the server across the wire to the web tier, we increasingly must debug and test in the browser. This session covers debugging and testing tools for clients, JavaScript, and Ajax.
13:40–14:25 (45m) General
Modeling Denormalization - The Speed You Need, the Order You Crave
Duncan Beevers (Kongregate)
Denormalization of data can ease the pressure when your queries get out of hand, but it shouldn't be handled as an after-thought. Creating first-class representations of your denormalized data makes it easy to keep data in sync and developers on the same page.
14:30–15:15 (45m) General
RESTful Everything - Towards a Complete Resource-oriented Workflow
Ingo Weiss (Metaversum GmbH)
Rails' RESTful routing facility provides developers with conventions for naming controllers and controller methods. However, Rails fails to keep up the RESTful momentum beyond controllers. This presentation is about all the good things that happen when picking up where Rails left off and establishing resource-oriented conventions for helper names and CSS classes.
15:20–16:05 (45m) General
Stories on a Cloud - Distributed Browser Testing with Selenium
Martin Sadler (CitySafe)
Once upon a time there was a browser, now there are many, and as developers we have to ensure our web applications run on them all (well most of them anyway!). With the advent of rich internet applications, it's common to have sites which increasingly rely on Javascript. We need a way to ensure our apps run reliably whatever the browser and platform.
8:30–9:00 (30m)
Break: Welcome Coffee
10:15–10:45 (30m)
Break: AM Break
16:05–16:45 (40m)
Break
9:00–9:15 (15m) General, Keynote
Welcome
David A. Black (Ruby Central, Inc.)
Opening remarks.
9:15–10:15 (1h) Keynote
Keynote
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
More information coming soon
16:45–16:55 (10m) Keynote
Meet the Sun You Don't Know
Nick Sieger (Sun Microsystems, Inc.)
You think Sun is the Java company. Enterprise Edition. Steak and strippers. But Java’s only part of the story, and the story is changing every day. In ten minutes, you’ll get a whirlwind tour of a different Sun, one that gives hardware breaks to startups, open sources cornerstone software like Solaris, OpenJDK, ZFS and DTrace, and actively funds Ruby projects on and off the JVM.
17:00–18:00 (1h) Keynote
Keynote
Jeremy Kemper (37signals)
More information coming soon
19:30–22:30 (3h) Event
Wednesday Birds of a Feather Sessions (BoFs)
Following the planned sessions during the day, it's time for RailsConf Europe participants to take the floor. BoFs are informal conversations that you and other participants plan. Visit the BoF page for more details and to sign up to lead a BoF of your own.
12:20–13:40 (1h 20m)
Break: Lunch
News and Coverage
co-presented by Ruby Central, Inc. O'Reilly

Diamond Sponsors

  • Engine Yard
  • Sun Microsystems

Gold Sponsors

  • Brightbox
  • ELC Technologies

Premier Media Partners

  • Linux Journal
  • T3N

Sponsor Opportunities

For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at RailsConf Europe, contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com

Download the RailsConf Europe Sponsor/Exhibitor Prospectus

Media and Promotional Opportunities

Download the Media & Promotional Partner Brochure (PDF) for more information on trade opportunities with O'Reilly conferences, or contact mediapartners@ oreilly.com.

Program Ideas

Post your suggestions for speakers, topics, and activities on the RailsConf Europe wiki or send an email to railseurope-idea@ oreilly.com.

Press and Media

For media-related inquiries, contact Maureen Jennings at maureen@oreilly.com.

Contact Us

View a complete list of RailsConf Europe Contacts