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I started to list the session that I liked the most and I soon noticed that I was listing the whole RubyConf schedule! I learned a lot from the all the speakers and from the questions of the audience. I also have to mention that RubyConf is a more intimate conference than say JavaOne. At JavaOne, you are easily lost amongst the 15,000 developers and and marketers in attendance. RubyConf 2006 had about 300 hard core Rubyist in attendance, and me as an observer. Nathanial Talbott, of Terralien, reminded the audience that the first RubyConf, back in 2001, had roughly 30 participants and perhaps one or two of those where paid ruby practitioners.

Oh, I forgot to mention some Rails tips that I received during breakfast of the last day of the conference. I had breakfast with some rails developers from BraveNet. I asked them if they give tell me the key hint or tip that a new rails developers should be aware of. I was told told to never ever use namespaces in models, and that I should seriously think about using namespaces in controllers. Another general rails tip was to use routes to make pretty urls, as opposed to namespace controllers.

RubyConf was a great experience and I can’t wait to next year!

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyconf, rubyconf2006, rails, javaone

For the last session of RubyConf 2006, John Lam gave a talk by the name “You got your Ruby in my CLR!” RubyCLR is “a high-performance Ruby to .NET bridge that allows seamless integration of CLR and Ruby objects in the same Win32 process.” RubyCLR started as a tradition. John has a three-year-old son and for his first birthday John wanted to give him something other than plastic toys. For his son’s first birthday, John wrote a python program. John said that this was a way for him to “hack on family time.” For his son’s second birthday, John wanted to write a Ruby program that interoperated with Microsoft/CLR libraries for a flash card like game.

John had some code samples of how of using RubyCLR to develop a Windows Forms application. RubyCLR is open to C# hacks, it allows inline C# code in Ruby files! RubyCLR makes .NET suck less. John also talked about another scenario for using RubyCLR in a .NET environment. He stated that XAML is just too verbose and that with RubyCLR developer can use the XML Builder approach to building Avalon UI applications.

If you want to adopt a technology like RubyCLR, or JRuby for that matter, John suggests that you introduce it in non-threating tasks such as testing or administrative scripting. Another interesting quote by John was when he said “everything in life is easy until you turn on security.” He made this comment when asked about how he deals with opening a Ruby class when it has passed the verifier. I am sure he will come up with an interesting solution to issues like security, especially now that John Lam has been hired by Microsoft to continue his work with RubyCLR.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyconf, rubyconf2006, rubyclr, .net, microsoft, c#

Justin Gehtland of Relevance gave a RubyConf session titled Streamlined: A Framework for Data-centric Web Applications. Streamlined is a Ruby on Rails application that is meant to be used in the back-end to manage and administer application data. According to Justin, these back-end administrative views are repetitive and similar, usually with a login, tabular data, and CRUD support. Justin was tired of hacking these administration views for clients so his company developed Streamlined. Right out the box, Streamlined supports authorization, pagination, user preferences, and in a future release it will support role based authorization. Justin mentions that Streamlined goes beyond scaffolding and provides a feature rich ajax powered relationship management. As he stated, “To quote one of our preeminent thinkers of our time, Paris Hilton, ‘that’s HOT!'” Streamlined uses ajax views by default but this can be easily changed. In most situations all you need is to replace the CSS to get started with Streamlined as it provides the 80% of a clients’ requirements. For the remaining 20%, Streamlined allows custom views and has a great declarative DSL for modifying the default behavior.
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Ryan Davis and Jacob Harris came up with a fantastic idea of holding a RejectConf after the scheduled RubyConf sessions. RejectConf was held saturday night after Matz keynote and was made up of 5 to 10 minutes talks by rubyist whose session proposal was shot down by the RubyConf selection committee. RejectConf was definitely a high light of the conference and thanks to however brought the three cases of beer!!!

The first reject of the night was Steven Baker who gave a top ten list of why not to use RSpec. It seems that RSpec does not get any respect, in a very Rodney Dangerfield-like way. According to Steven, if you use RSpec that is great, if you don’t that is better yet. Here is the first reason why you should not use RSpec, Steven was drunk when he wrote it. The next reason, Documentation is overrated. Moving down the list to the second reason not to use RSpec, tests that don’t read anything like English prevent customers from pointing out glaring errors in business logic. And the top reason not to use RSpec, because explaining to new members of your team that you really can test something that doesn’t exist is fun.
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Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, the language designer of Ruby, gave the keynote speech for RubyConf 2006. The keynote was titled The Return of the Bikeshed or Nuclear Plant in the Backyard. I didn’t know what the bike shed and nuclear power plant in the title referred to. I later discovered that is refers to Parkinson’s Law which in essence states that the least important the decision the more people have an opinion about it, because most people don’t have solutions for hard problems. The title of the keynote set the theme for the night.

According to Matz, Ruby is a programming, scripting, lightweight, and dynamic language. Matz noted the difference between some of these. He stated that the term lightweight language is popular in Japan where as scripting language is detested in the states. Yet Ruby is all of these and more…
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Michael Granger gave a RubyConf 2006 presentation on Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation in Ruby. Michael gave some interesting demos where he was able to break a sentence into its grammatical building blocks such as subject, verb, and noun. He was also able to translate a sentence into a more generic version of itself. This session was a personal favorite although I don’t have a current need for language processing libraries.

Here is a list of Ruby libraries which Michael recommends:
Stemmable – an implementation of Porter Stemming Algorithm.
Chronic – a natural language date/time parser written in pure Ruby.
Ruby WordNet – Ruby WordNet is a Ruby interface to the WordNet Lexical Database.
Ruby LinkParser – Ruby port of the perl module Lingua::LinkParser used to determine the structure of a sentence.
Ruby Linguistics – A Ruby framework that integrates Ruby WordNet, Ruby LinkParser. Here is some code of Ruby Linguistics in use:
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