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Wednesday morning at RailsConf Europe brought first a quick spiel from Cyndi Mitchell, VP of Strategy at ThoughtWorks, and then a best practices discussion from Michael “Koz” Koziarski and Marcel Molina.

Cyndi began her Ruby in the enterprise talk with a flash back to the dot com bubble, the days when business models were nowhere to be found, bloatware was prevalent, companies were told and did invest in large amounts of infrastructure and software glue, and the CIO commanded from the engine room. Fast forward to 2004. Migration projects were failing, businesses were upset with IT, everything was a mess.

Cuts began.

Enter the innovator CIO. Businesses demanded more in six months than they had received in two years. Not only did they want it faster, they wanted to be able to change it mid-stream and afterwards. They were now in a global economy and needed to be able to move faster, be more agile. They were looking for a better way. There was a better way. No longer did you need huge amounts of infrastructure to build a business application. No longer did you have to wait months for a result. No longer were you in an environment lacking the ability to quickly change.

Enter Ruby.

Ruby made it possible. Rails brought Ruby to the masses. Now, technologies like JRuby and IronRuby are lowering the barriers to Ruby adoption in the enterprise, where Java and .NET abound. Ruby and Rails developers, armed not only with programming knowledge but also business saavy are helping Ruby to cross the chasm. It is an exciting time.

Michael “Koz” Koziarski and Marcel Molina discussed best practices, focusing mainly around the fat model skinny controller method of development. Check out the articles for all of the fat model goodness. A few additional points from the talk were:

• All code in a single method should be at the same level of abstraction
• The point of object oriented programming (OOP) is that the code should map to the business that you are trying to model
• Use associations as much as possible
• A major point of test-first development is that by listing your expectations first, you approach the problem from the human perspective

The plan for the rest of the day for me includes JRuby presentations, Hobo, and more. What a day!

Random Goodness

• JRuby Introduction Presentation
• BarCampOrlando Venue Chosen
• Justin Blake joins the ADS CREW