Lone Star Ruby Conf Second Day (morning edition)

06 Sep 2008

While checking out at the hotel I ran into Coby from confreaks.com They are recording the conference so you’ll be able to see the talks online sometime soon. They’re not cheap, but their videos are very good (they capture the output of the presenters computer and display it side by side with video of the presentation – you seriously need to check out their site), and they offer a discount if the conference is willing to CreativeCommons license the talks.

Starting off the morning was “Ruby: A Year of Innovation” with Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer. They had a lot to cover so it went pretty fast. I tried to keep up as best I could.

Jason Seifer was up first:

Gregg Pollack took over and talked about:

“Using jQuery with Ruby Web Frameworks” with Yehuda Katz

Yehuda used screwunit (a BDD javascript test framework) to BDD an implementation of a live updater in JQuery (which is an alternate Javascript framework). He had trouble with getting his tests to fail (some sort of caching problem). That’s rough in front of a 100 people. JQuery and screwunit look interesting, but I found it hard to focus on what he was doing ignore the difficulties of getting specs to pass. He finished his presentation with a declaration that you should never attempt to do a live coding presentation.

I thought it might be nice to step out of my comfort zone and take a look at “Resource-Driven Web Development With Waves” presented by Dan Yoder. Alternate title: “When Functional Programming Meets HTTP”

So, why use waves? Well, you can have more control over your app, use functional programming, and be very RESTful. Waves has Functor as much of its processing. It helps matching requests to response actions. You can have some pretty spare code that defines a bunch of restful paths.

Things that don’t fit anyone else:

And now for Lunch. Which is Chicken fried Chicken.