Conference has drawn very interesting speakers and international crowd – from Finland (naturally), Sweden, Poland, Germany, Russia and other countries. I made a few notes from selected talks on the conference.
Chris Wanstrath / GitHub (@defunkt)
- Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/err/inside-github
- Linus Trovalds Google tech talk about git – where Linus tell you that you’re stpid if you’re not using git
- rack-mobile-detect – is used by GitHub, super useful if you’re planning to create mobile optimized version
- GitHub uses Unicorn as an application server – personally I’m not sure if that’s better than Apache + Passenger. Chris tells that Unicorn is cool, because does fair load balancing on Linux kernel level, also Rails are loaded only once – and then required number of processes are forked – and this is very fast, a lot faster than loading rails separately for each Mongrel. And when one of the processes dies – there’s no need to re-load Rails, but just fork another process.
- GitHub users BERT to forward requests to one of their six servers – BERT to Erlang is the same as JSON to JavaScript
- GitHub doesn’t use delayed_job anymore since they needed several queues with different priorities – so far they use resque, but are considering developing a real queue management system
Jose Valim / Plataforma (@josevalim)
- Brazilian Rails consultants and developers: http://plataformatec.com.br/
- Developed several interesting components to make their life easier – extracted common components from several customer projects and open-sourced them
- User authorisation and roles: Devise – http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2010/04/authentication-is-with-devise/
- Nice forms with labels, error handling, etc. : Simple Form – http://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form
Mike Dirolf / MongoDB (@mdirolf) & Jonathan Weiss / CouchDB (@jweiss)
- Two very interesting NoSQL presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/mdirolf/mongodb-at-frozenrails, http://www.slideshare.net/jweiss/couchdb-on-rails-frozenrails-2010
- Answering a question from the audience Mike said that fault tolerance is something that is not quite there yet in MongoDB – there is a possibility to do recovery, but there’s a chance data might be lost
- There is no such issue in CouchDB, it also is written in Erland and provides REST API
- Links to project homepages: http://couchdb.apache.org/ & http://www.mongodb.org/ – worth taking a look at both
Yehuda Katz / EngineYard (@wycats)
- Very interesting presentation about developing web application for mobile devices (in Rails 3)
- One of the central messages – HTML5 is coming – learn how to use it now, if you want to stay in business
- I really hope Yehuda will publish his slides – it was a presentation worth spreading around
- interesting thoughts:
- same optimization methods as we traditionally use for Rails apps on desktop are not suitable for mobile browsers due to constraints – connection availability, memory, cpu, battery, etc.
- don’t count on browser cach on mobile devices – separate data and presentation, cache presentation using localStorage feature of HTML5, load only data from the web after that
- mobile browsers are updated a lot faster than desktop borwser – there are new browsers in the new phones, and nobody uses 2 year old phone
- HTML5 will become mainstream on mobile devices a lot faster than on desktop (IE6 will not happen on mobile)
- when developing apps for mobile take into account that in some places people still pay per kilobyte of traffic
- incremental rendering on the mobile is evil – it consumes battery and can be very slow, unpleasant and unusable for the user
- battery – unoptimized sites can easily drain the battery, and even though users are most likely to blame the phone manufacturer it is good to think about it
- http://Railsdispatch.com – recommended reading about Rails 3
Carl Lerche / Engine Yard (@carllerche)
- Carl told about Rails 3 and migration to version 3 from earlier ones http://www.slideshare.net/carllerche/frozen-rails-slides
- Migration itself is not that difficult (provided that you know what you’re doing) – it can even be done in 15 minutes, but thus far stability and performance of Rails 3 / Ruby 1.9.1 are not quite there yet
- Rails 3 is not finished – the plan is to make RC for RailsConf, and the it will be released “when it’s ready”
- When asked if they have done performance tests on Rails 3, Carl answered that, yes, they did, and its sad. Performance optimization is the next big step after stabilization.
- When asked which Ruby release is better to use with Rails 3, Carl answered – 1.8.7, since Ruby 1.9.1 still segfaults and is not ready for production sites.
JetBrains (@rubymine):
- new release of RubyMine is available with Rails3 support
- guys from JetBrains tell that TextMate development/maintenance is lagging behind, and they observe migration of TextMate and even vim users to RubyMine (there’s now vim interface emultion)
overall impression:
- Apple is the king – virtually everybody was walking around with either MacBook, iPhone, iPad or all of the above
- first Rails conference in Finland was a huge success – I really hope there will be FrozenRails 2011
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