Aehso’s Output

RailsConf Europe Day 2

[Update: Some of the presentation files are now available on the RailsConf Europe website]
Slight delay on writing this one up as I was in transit on Thurs and at a wedding on Friday.  Anyway, this summary is going to be a lot shorter as I didn’t get as much out of Wednesday’s sessions.

Rails Hydra: Synthesizing an Application out of Multiple Rails Codebases (Craig R. McClanahan, Nick Sieger, Sun Microsystems)

Good talk on building services using several Rails applications, the Sun guys also got a chance to demo use of NetBeans 6 for Rails development (with some live demo debugging thrown in along with great audience participation!) Most of the demo centered around making it easier to develop DRY ActiveResource implementations. ActiveResource is almost definitely the right underpinnings for any RESTful service implementation but I think it still needs a bit more work around the edges.

Using a HAXOR Approach for Peace and Productivity (Tim Dysinger)

Good talk on how to manage interaction between designers and developers when developing Rails applications that use HTML, Ajax and XML Over REST. Quite high level (and if I’m honest, I was working away in the background so I couldn’t give it my full attention…)

Browser-based Testing of Massive Ajax-using Rails Applications with Selenium (Till Vollmer)
Good overview of using Selenium to test web applications from within the browser, covering use of Selenium IDE (browser based Javascript IDE), Selenium RC and the Selenium on Rails Plugin. Highlighted that Selenium struggles a bit with testing Ajax heavy web pages but it is possible with hand crafted scripts that use waitForVisible and/or waitForElementPresent events…

Functional JavaScript Development with Prototype (Ben Nolan)
Bit of an edge talk for the JavaScript fanatics but Ben presented well and it seemed well received by the audience…

Ruby on Rails leads you to the e-business (Quentin Tousart)
Mildly interesting talk on experiences gained in building two e-commerce websites using Rails.

Obscure Data Formats, Workflow, and Remote Synchronization (Chad Thatcher)
Another interesting case study on building a Rails front-end for a legacy data format (in this case the RISM format used by the British Library to catalog music manuscripts). Interesting use of composed_of in the Rails model objects to compensate for the fact that the underlying data was in hierarchical rather than relational form.

That’s about it, I met up with Sean Hanley from exoftware and David Rice . Mental note to self, get into RubyIreland…

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