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Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems gave an insightful presentation on Internationalization (I18N), Multilingualization (M17N), and unicode. Even Tim who has spent most of his career in unicode support add admitted that “for some this is not the most stimulating subject.” Tim asked the audience of programmers, “why do we care about internationalization?” The reason is not so obvious to native English speakers but the answer can be found online. English is no longer the predominant language of the internet. A software project should think about localization (L10N) and internationalization from the onset. According to Tim, it doesn’t make much sense to develop and application that does not support I18N, M17N, and L10N.

Tim stated that if you had the following regular expression piece of code, it is probably a bug:

/[a-zA-Z]+/

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Because Josh Susser was unavailable for his RubyConf session, the organizers opened the time slot to the audience members, allowing each 5 to 10 minutes for demos or presentations. Here are some of the noteworthy presentations from this time slot.

Someone from NOAA presented on Ruby Queue. Ruby Queue is a tool for building linux clusters. The speaker recommended that Ruby Queue be used in small research teams with between 5 to 30 nodes. Here is a description of Ruby Queue from its website, “ruby queue (rq) is a tool used to create instant linux clusters by managing sqlite databases as nfs mounted priority work queues”

Someone else presented on irb tips and tricks. One great tip was a short script that allows irb to maintain a shell-like history. If you are like most Rubyist, you use the irb console for a lot of prototyping. Make your life a bit easier and trick out your irb. The Tips and Tricks page listed above mentions several other useful tips such as tab completion.
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Laurent Sansonetti of Apple gave an awesome presentation on RubyOSA. RubyOSA is a Ruby/AppleEvent bridge that allows Ruby programs to interact and manipulate Apple applications in the same fashion that AppleScript can. Here is a code sample from the RubyOSA site:

[source:ruby]
require ‘rbosa’
app = OSA.app_with_name(‘iTunes’)
track = app.current_track
p track # -> #<OSA::Itunes::File_track:0x1495e20>
p track.name # -> “Over The Rainbow”
p track.artist # -> “Keith Jarrett”
p track.duration # -> 362
p track.date_added.to_s # -> “2006-06-30”
p track.enabled? # -> true
[/source]

According to Laurent, Ruby has been shipped with OS X since 10.2, ‘Jaguar’ which buncled Ruby 1.6.7. Apple packages Ruby as a framework which is easier for Mac development and allows versioning. In addition to Ruby, OS X includes RubyGems and gems like rake, rails and friends (mongrel, capistrano), libxml2, and sqlite3. Laurent mentioned that he is open to suggestions for adding including additional gems into OS X.
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Nathaniel Talbott, fearless leader at Terralien, drew some comparisons between Ruby’s characteristics and the way you should go about starting and managing a software development outfit. According to Nathaniel, you are saying something when choosing Ruby as your programming language. I have heard other business folks make this same comment, as to say that you are a better developer if you pick a programming language not because its the current trend in job postings but because of your passion for the language. This same statement can be made of Python programmers. Nathaniel also stated that “rails has been a great catalyst” for designers/programmers to start their own company.

Here are Ruby’s characteristics and how they should match to your business ethos:

Ruby’s succinct expressions are one of its characteristics. According to Nathaniel, succinct is power. Succinct allows you to do more with less and as a small independent company you should strive to be succinct in your code, contracts, process, and mind set.
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It was great to have Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, the language designer of Ruby, accessible throughout the RubyConf. I saw him throughout the conference during lunch, breaks, and after hours. During this session he answered questions from the crowd. To get the Q&A session started, Rich Kilmer jokingly asked the first question in behalf of DHH, “my girlfriend wants to know if you have a girlfriend and should I be worried about that?” DHH really didn’t ask this question, it sounded like this was an inside joke from RailsConf 2006. Most of the important and serious questions asked by those in attendance where relating to backward compatibility issues in Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0. Matz stated that “if you want a stable Ruby, use 1.8 forever.” The key questions that resonated from the audience dealt with heavy implementation details and future features such as continuations, green threads, method lookups, noobie involvement in the C code for Ruby, mailing lists, feature requests/process, testing, and documentation. Regarding questions of feature requests, Matz made it understood that he is open to feature requests but that he would appreciate patches, prototypes, and code along with those feature requests.

Someone in the audience said something I thought it was funny. In effect someone commented that, “one reason I love Ruby is because I tried Python first.”

Nick Sieger was also at the conference and he must know shorthand because he transcribed many of the questions and answers. Take a look at the his transcripts here.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rubyconf, rubyconf2006, matz, python, dhh

John Long, lead developer of Radiant CMS gave an in-depth overview of this Ruby on Rails driven Content Management System. Radiant is a lightweight CMS with a ‘pristine interface’ and basic elements such as pages, layout, and snippets. According to John, the design philosophy of Radiant is ‘simplicity over features.’ Basically, Radiant is ‘a little bit more than a blogging engine.’

Radiant CMS uses a tag based template engine, unlike rails which uses ERb in views. Radiant tags look like those provided by Struts taglibs. Radiant tags provide the same functionality available in rails erb-based views, only that tags are more Dreamweaver/WYSIWYG friendly.
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