leah blogs

September 2006

17sep2006 · RailsConf Europe on index cards, part I

A note to the interested reader: These are the raw notes I jotted down at RailsConf Europe 2006. They are probably misleading, out-of-context and not particularly useful if you didn’t attend the sessions. Nevertheless, enjoy.

David Heinemeier Hansson

  • Textmate as a presentation tool
  • Later on 1.2.0rc1
  • REST, SimplyRestful
  • 5 months since last release
  • next release after 1.2: 2.0(!)
  • Rails is not about inventing your own style
  • Demonstration of SimplyRestful
  • ActiveResource
  • SimplyHelpful: clearing up the view
  • assumptions about partial names
  • new development happens on plugins
  • Flower?

Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Users

  • Passion
  • Passion is not rational
  • High-resolution experience
  • Don’t focus on the tool, but what to do with it
  • Conversational beats formal
  • Flow
  • If you want them to RTFM, write a better FM.

Evan Henshaw-Plath: Integrating Asterisk and Rails

  • PHP of telephony: ugly and hackable
  • Evil apps: “To enlarge your penis, press three.”
  • call routing and transcoding platform
  • configuring Asterisk—sendmail.cf
  • RAGI bridges Asterisk and Ruby
  • RAI is a RAGI fork under active development
  • http://rai.idapted.com

Jamis Buck: Cutting Edge Capistrano

  • What is Capistrano
  • the need to manage/deploy a cluster
  • Version 1.2 this morning
  • Restricting scope to single machines, roles
  • remote execution (invoke, shell tasks)
  • capistrano-ext
    • watch_load
    • uptime
  • Future
    • third-party extensions

Marcel Molina, Jr.: Sharing RJS: Reuse at application level

  • Introduction
  • David has and belongs to many Hanssons
  • Refactoring RJS code to avoid duplication
  • various approaches
    • refactor to helper… DON’T
    • monkeypatch… DON’T
  • History of RJS
  • conclusio: Reuse RJS snippets with <<, made for JavaScript inclusion.
  • Bonus: reuse RJS elsewhere
  • Don’t use DOM if CSS is enough

David A. Black: Relational Database Engineering and Rails

  • Are Rails databases well engineered?
  • Lessons from REST and CRUD
  • Return to the protocol is not a step back
  • Normalization is good
    • never heard of with respect to ActiveRecord
    • good
  • ActiveRecord databases are application databases
  • REST and CRUD converge
  • 80%-baked database engineering
    • first normalize, then AR-ify

Thomas Fuchs: Adventures in JavaScript testing

  • http://mir.aculo.us
  • use alert() only when appropriate
  • unit-testing JavaScript
  • using Rake to automate tests with the javascript_test plugin
    • uses WEBrick
  • BDD, rspec-like API, too
  • Tools:
    • Firebug
    • Venkman (can profile)
    • Safari Web Inspector
    • Drosera
  • test on all browsers you want to support
  • #prototype on freenode.net

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