Rails: the framework for arrogant bastards. -Chad Fowler

DHH’s Keynote

Celebrating what we have

• > 1 million downloads
• hundreds of plugins
• ~10k people on rubyonrails-talk
• who gets paid to code rails? way over half the room raises a hand
• tons of new books
• several new editors and ide’s

A peak at rails 2.0

• won’t be a unicorn
• it’s all about making things nicer one thing at a time
• david is demoing creating an address book from scratch during the presentation, try that in another language :)
• I realize this is important to show how to use the new stuff but I’ve been doing this for several months so it’s kind of boring.
• 24 controllers in highrise and 22 are restful – point: this stuff actually works in real applications
• shopify is using active resource for their new marketplace thing
• fluxiom uses active resource
• rails is not switzerland, it is opinionated (action web service no longer with rails 2.0, in its place is active resource)
• friends and allies
  • ajax
  • rest
  • openid

9 other things i like about rails 2

• breakpoints are back
  • ruby-debug is the new debugger
  • showing video of how to use the debugger, looks really nice
  • you can go up, down, backtrace and introspect
• http performance
  • even on the fastest connections, it really matters
  • it’s good to separate out javascript files but only in development not in deployment
    • <%= javascript_include_tag :all, :cache => true %>
    • <%= stylesheet_include_tag :all, :cache => true %>
  • also can cheat by using wildcard asset hosts (ie: assets0.domain.com, assets1.domain.com)
    • config.action_controller.asset_host = ‘asset%d.domain.com’
• query cache
• action.mimetype.renderer
  • index.html.erb (how to rename your views with .rhtml and .rxml)
  • index.xml.builder
  • index.rss.erb
  • index.atom.builder
• config.initializers
  • much simpler now, config/initializers to separate out individual initializers and allows sharing across apps
• Sexy migrations
  • great story because it started as a plugin
  • flip the declaration of the type and name of column, allows to create several columns of the same type all at once
• http authentication
  • use to poo poo but that was when he only made html applications
  • bad fit for graphical client, great fit for api
• The MIT assumption
  • licenses are hard
  • use MIT if you just want to share code
  • script/generate plugin assumes MIT now
• Spring cleaning
  • rails is getting crufted, so now it’s time to clean things out
  • deprecated things are getting fully removed and moved into plugins (such as in_place_editor)

I’ll be posting session summaries immediately following each one that I attend so stay tuned here. Also, I might be live blogging some of them.