MountainWest RubyConf 2009

On March 13 and 14 of this year, a regular conference on the Ruby programming language was held in the state of Utah.

I noticed that there are shorter reports at this conference compared to previous conferences. Speakers, in general, invested in 25-30 minutes, while in November last year at RubyConf 2008 they needed about an hour for each speech.
By the way, I was surprised to see the Microsoft company among the sponsors of the conference. Despite the half-alive IronRuby, somehow I don’t associate this organization with the open-source community in general and the R * -communities in particular.

It will be interesting, mainly, to the rubists and railmen. Some presentations may be of interest to Java programmers who wish to migrate towards Ruby / Rails.
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I personally liked, and therefore recommend, the following reports: The Great Rails Refactor and BDD with Cucumber.


Name: LittleBIGRuby
Tags: reading, CSV, REST
Duration: 25 minutes
Description: "Reading is the best teaching." The speaker talks about why it is important not only to write code, but also to read the code of other people. The report provides tips on how to read and from which Ruby libraries you do not need to start reading the code. As a digression from the topic, the speaker describes two libraries: FasterCSV and Restclient. The first library is a smart CSV parser, and the second is a library for accessing remote REST services. It describes the benefits of these libraries and how to use them.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-10-30-littlebigruby-james-edward-grey-ii.html

Name: In a World of Middleware, Who Needs Monolithic Applications?
Tags: Rack, Rails, Sinatra
Duration: 28 minutes
Description: What is middleware and why are these simple mortal developers? What features does this additional layer provide in the application? Is it hard to use? Is it just for the rail? If you could not answer at least one question, then you should view this report. EngineYard-sheep talks about middleware capabilities using the example of Rack, combining applications written in Rails and Sinatra.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-11-05-in-a-world-of-middleware-who-needs-monolithic-applications-jon-crosby.html

Title: The Great Rails Refactor
Tags: Rails, Merb, merge
Duration: 38 minutes
Description: A very detailed description of how Rails and Merb merge. Orm agnosticism. Unification of interfaces. Refactoring existing Rails components. Very interesting.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-11-55-the-great-rails-refactor-yehuda-katz.html

Name: Sequel
Tags: sequel, database, reading by piece of paper
Duration: 28 minutes
Description: Within half an hour, a person very quickly talks about an ORM called Sequel. A person reads a piece of paper so his speech is perceived very difficult. By the way, the electronic version of his speech.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-12-30-sequel-jeremy-evans.html

Name: Vertebra
Tags: cloud computing, XMPP
Duration: 31 minutes
Description: When you need to administer large networks, you can do this by connecting to each machine via SSH and running the right scripts on remote machines. This can be done, but if there are a lot of machines, then all this becomes more and more difficult. In order to automate such work, the Vertebra system was developed. This is an XMPP-based protocol (yes, the one on which Jabber sits) an application that, in order to ensure fault tolerance, literally arranges the exchange of messages between machines on the network and with the help of these messages ensures the performance of distributed tasks.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-15-00-vertebra-kirk-haines.html

Name: FFI
Tags: MRI, jRuby, Rubinius
Duration: 22 minutes
Description: FFI is a library that allows you to run Ruby code regardless of the version of the interpreter used. That is, you write something on jRuby, give this code to someone, and this person can run it not only on jRuby but also on MRI, Rubinius, etc. How it is done, how fast it works and how it can be used is described in the report.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-16-10-ffi-jeremy-hinegardner.html

Name: Jive Talkin ': DSL Design and Construction
Tags: DSL, internal, external
Duration: 36 minutes
Description: Another DSL report. Differences between external and internal DSL. Describes the features of building DSL and techniques that should be used in the design. There is nothing revolutionary in the report that says nothing, but if you don’t know anything about DSL it will be interesting.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/13-mar-2009-18-10-jive-talkin-dsl-design-and-construction-jeremy-mcanally.html

Title: Rhodes - The Open Source Ruby Framework for Building Mobile Applications
Tags: framework, mobile, local webserver
Duration: 33 minutes
Description: Rhodes - Ruby framework designed for developing applications for mobile devices. At the beginning of March, they supported Windows Mobile and Symbian. In the near future they have to make support for the iPhone and Android. The framework is made under the strong influence of Rails, so the rail crew will find there many familiar things like rake tasks and generators. One of the main ideas of the framework is to use a local web server as a proxy server for accessing remote data.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/14-mar-2009-11-05-rhodes-the-open-source-ruby-framework-for-building-mobile-applications-adam-blum.html

Name: Adhearsion
Tags: telephony, skype
Duration: 29 minutes
Description: Adhearsion is a framework for developing applications using phones and Skype. The framework allows you to create components that can interact with each other, with the file system and respond to the actions of the caller. In spite of the fact that the speaker was treacherously wired and he couldn’t show the full-fledged demo creation of the application, the framework is quite interesting, especially for people connected with phones and programming applications for phones.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/14-mar-2009-11-55-adhearsion-jay-phillips.html

Title: Improving Your Ruby on Rails Applications
Tags: UI, design, rules
Duration: 31 minutes
Description: Two thirds of the talk are about what user interfaces should be. During the remaining third, it is shown how to apply these rules using the example of a standard scaffold application. Interesting and clear.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/14-mar-2009-12-30-improving-the-usability-of-your-ruby-on-rails-applications-adam-dunford-jason-edwards.html

Name: BDD with Cucumber
Tags: automated testing
Duration: 27 minutes
Description: Cucumber is a script that allows you to use the functionality description as a set of functions that run automated tests. That is, you write the text in English, following a certain format, and the script finds the tests that cover the described functionality, runs these tests and shows the result of the tests with standard green-red traffic lights. This script can work with different testing tools: TestUnit, Rspec, ...
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/14-mar-2009-15-00-bdd-with-cucumber-ben-mabey.html

Name: Wii Ruby: just work.
Tags: wii, jRuby
Duration: 25 minutes
Description: Nintendo is launching a game console called the Wii. This console consists of a processor, a manipulator that tracks its own movements and transmits information about these movements, and a receiver that receives these signals from the manipulator and redirects it to the processor. The report describes and shows how you can replace the processor standard for the console with your own script written in Ruby. More precisely, jRuby is used. The script uses Java libraries for its work.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/14-mar-2009-17-00-wii-ruby-all-work-and-no-play-just-wont-do-james-britt.html

Name: La Dolce Vita Rubyista
Tags: inspiration, productivity
Duration: 39 minutes
Description: A report in which several pieces of video are embedded. The report focuses on how to keep your own motivation at work and how to work in a high. Funny.
URL: mwrc2009.confreaks.com/14-mar-2009-17-35-la-dolce-vita-rubyista-alan-whitaker.html