Railsconf 2009
During RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Rails 3: Stepping off of the golden path.
##Description of the talk:
Back in December 2008, the Rails and Merb core teams surprised everybody by deciding to merge their teams and focus their energy on a common release: Rails 3.0. On one hand, Rails is famous for being an opinionated Rapid Application Development framework following the well known “convention over configuration” design paradigm. On the other hand, Merb is known for its performance, extreme modularity and greenfield experimentations. The new unified team is working on having the best of both worlds, but the real questions are:
How does that affect me as a Ruby/Rails/Merb developer? When should I step off of the golden path and why?
Matt Aimonetti, Merb core and Rails team member will take you through the new world of possibilities now available to Rails 3.0 developers. You will see the pros and cons of different options for people desiring to step off the “golden path”. Matt will show concrete examples of application/cases where alternative solutions could be more appropriate and others where you are better off staying on the golden path
##Slides
A PDF version can also be downloaded [here]({{ page.slides }}).
##Video
The presentation wasn’t recorded.
##Blog post
RailsConf 2009 has now finished. This time last year, no one would have ever guessed that the Merb and Rails teams would join forces and focus on what will hopefully be known as one of the best Web Frameworks.
It was encouraging to see so many people excited about what’s being ported over from Merb and the new options available to people who are currently limited by the existing stack. For those interested in pushing Rails further and doing stuff out of the norm, here are my slides. Arthur Zapparoli from Brazilian Rails squad recorded most of the talk and told me he will upload the video ASAP. You can also read Yehuda Katz' blog which covers what he talked about.
It was really great to meet a lot of new people as well as people I only knew via IRC/IM/twitter.
It was a great honor to finally meet Dan Kubb (DataMapper), Ninh Hernandez-Búi & Hongli McLovin Lai (Phusion), Peter Cooper (RubyInside), Raimonds Simanovskis (Oracle adapter for AR), Arun Gupta (Sun/Glassfish), Jeremy Hinegardner (crate), Michael Maxilien (IBM), Dana Jones (railsbridge), Zach Zolton & Geoff Buesing (CouchRest) and of course the Brazilian crew (lots of awesome .br guys came this year, I’m looking forward to RailsSummit) and last but not least, the French speaking crew (I’m glad to see Ruby is picking up back home). (I know I’m forgetting people… sorry about that)
It was also really nice to chat with some domain experts like Dave Astels, Aslak Hellesøy, Rich Kilmer, David Chelimsky, Ryan Brown, Derek Neighbors etc.. to get their feedback on various projects I’m working on.
Leaving Vegas, I feel like the Rails community is expanding quickly (it was the first RailsConf for 1/4 to 1/5 of the attendees) and that the community is organizing itself to welcome a new audience (better documentation, great initiatives like railsbridge.org, willingness to help), as well as trying to be more available to the ‘Enterprise’ world.
These feelings were enforced during our Rails Activism BOF and after talking with 3rd party developers and sponsors really trying to solve problems that newcomers to Rails are now facing. This is an exciting time.
##Presentation website
O’Reilly wrote a page covering this presentation.