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Three major ideas I took away from Railsconf 2007 are:

1. Facilitate conversation (Ze Frank)
2. Play nicely with others (Tim Bray)
3. Go mobile (Dave Thomas)

To that end, Atlantic Dominion Solutions is doing the following:

1. Learning more about JRuby, and creating a how-to on getting up and running with it.
2. Creating a low-cost introductory Ruby on Rails class for designers in the Orlando area.
3. Discovering ways to take our apps mobile.

What were two or three major ideas you took away from Railsconf 2007?

O’Reilly is posting the slides from the Railsconf 2007 presentations as they are released by the presenters. Get em here: http://www.web2expo.com/pub/w/51/presentations.html

Railconf day 2 was not disappointing. I was working the Rails For Booth a majority of the time, however I did get to some great sessions. One was “respond_to :voice,” which discussed using Telegraph with Asterisk. Telegraph makes it super simple to interface Rails apps with Asterisk, a free open-source telephone system. I also caught a presentation on Apollo, which I can’t yet begin to understand it, however it does look cool for creating desktop apps, so check it out if you are interested.

One of the highlights of the day was meeting David Heinemeier Hansson, the man. It is exciting to meet the person behind a movement that is causing huge changes in the way things are done - in this case, web application development. In the two minutes I got to speak with him, the impression that I got was that he is a very cool and humble guy. He is one person you should meet if you have the chance.

The nightly keynote was a presentation by Ze Frank, one of the funniest people I have ever seen speak. Check out his site for the insanity that is his site. Great stuff. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, don’t miss it.

Today is day 3, with a lot of great sessions and more people to meet. Very exciting.

The Pragmatic Studio is taking charitable donations at Railsconf 2007 to show the charity of the Ruby on Rails community. Donate here and show your love: http://pragmaticstudio.com/donate/

Getting into JRuby and the Railsconf 2007 tutorials - the fun begins.

Hello from Railsconf 2007! Thus far, the tutorials are great. I first tutorial I attended was “Scaling a Rails Application” presented by Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, owner of TextDrive and creator of many applications. In a sentence, his presentation can be summed up as: most scalability issues are not a Rails issue (per say), but rather an infrastructure issue (meaning the hardware that sits in front of the app and the servers the app sits on). He and I spoke after his talk about what it takes to test an application for thousands of concurrent users, and JRuby. For testing the capacity of an application, Jason said it can take a number of months and a few hundred thousand dollars. That was great to hear, having told that to a number of clients myself, and seeing their looks of horror. It’s ain’t cheap, and it ain’t quick. He and I also spoke about JRuby, which is getting a lot of press lately and for good reason. I downloaded the latest version and used the tutorial from Myers Development Studio to get it running on my Mac. It took a few minutes and life is good.

Per the JRuby site, JRuby is: ” an 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.” From what I gather, the result is the ability to package up a Rails app in a .war file and deploy it to an app server. Rock! I am told that you can get a 4x performance increase running a Rails app using JRuby. That’s nice. It is also a good way to bring Java developers into the Ruby and Rails worlds, having almost 0 learning curve (you can use NetBeans as an IDE, among others). I will be reading up on JRuby over the next few weeks and will write a post on what I find. If anyone has experience with JRuby please let us know.

The second presentation was Jamis Buck’s “Harnessing Capistrano,” a great presentation outlining how to use Capistrano for deployment (among other things - oh yes, it does more). Jamis is the author of Capistrano, one of the 37signals team, and one of the Rails core team. Download his presentation and read up on the latest.

These two tutorials wet my appetite for more. Tomorrow brings a full day of tutorials, and I will keep reporting on the goods and any tips I learn. If you are here at Railsconf and want to meet up, hit me up at rdempsey at techcfl dot com.

After a seemingly long day we are outy! We leave tomorrow for Portland and Railsconf, and look forward to seeing you all there. We will be back in full swing on Wednesday the 23rd. We will need a day or so to relax our brains after all of the wonderful info we will absorb during the conference.

Stop by the Rails For All booth, show us some love, buy a t-shirt, and let’s talk Rails! Lata!