Nick Sieger

RailsConf 2007: Saturday Morning Keynotes

Posted by Nick Sieger Sat, 19 May 2007 17:22:42 GMT

Cyndi Mitchell -- ThoughtWorks Studios

Enterprise (the “e” word)

Before IT got involved, “enterprise” was a bold new venture. Toyota manufacturing, Skype disruption of telephony.

Enterprise in terms of IT has come to mean bloatware, incompetence, corruption, waste of time, no value.

So this is the battle: The enterprise (to boldly go where no man has gone before) we need to reclaim vs. the bloatware/competence/corruption/fear-based selling etc.

RubyWorks -- package stack with haproxy, mongrel, monit through an RPM repository

For JRuby support, call Ola.

Tim Bray -- Web Guy from Sun Microsystems

Change the world that are better than just using a cool web framework: http://pragmaticstudio.com/donate/

Sun loves Ruby. Ruby and Rails, that is. The impact of the Ruby language is going to be at least as big as Rails is for web development.

Sun provided servers for Ruby 2.0 development, and can provide servers for your potentially cool, worthy, open source project, just drop Tim an email.

A few more obligatory plugs for NetBeans and Sun sponsoring the conference. “Pre-alpha,” he says. Hmm, I wonder what Tor would say about that!

JRuby: when would you use JRuby vs. Ruby? If you have no pain, keep using C Ruby. But if you have management concerns, deployment concerns, etc. then by all means do try it!

Obligatory handshake/sandal connection with ThoughtWorks and Cyndi -- running Mingle (and cruisecontrol.rb) with JRuby.

Sun: “Hi, the answer is Java, what was the question?” So why would Sun want to support Ruby? Well, you guys are programmers. Programmers who deliver quality software fast. And those programmers need computers, and OSes, and web servers, and support and services, etc. Plug, plug, plug.

How do you make money on free products? Sun has open-sourcing Java, Solaris, even Sparc. Joyent is open-sourcing their stuff. Where does the money come from? 1. Adoption 2. Deployment 3. Monetization at the point of value

What if we win? Are our problems over? No, we’ll have to deal with Java. And .NET. And PHP. From the audience: And COBOL. The Network Is The Computer. The Network Is Heterogeneous. Deal with it. So how do we interoperate?

• Just Run Java (and JRuby, of course!, and JavaScript, and PHP, etc.)
• Use Atom/REST. Everything should have a publish button. Don’t use WS-DeathStar or WCF or WSIT.

Developer issues: Scaling, Static vs. Dynamic, Maintainability, Concurrency, Tooling, Integration, Time to Market. Which two of these matter the most?

Tim’s final assertion: Maintainability and Time to Market, and that’s why we’re all at RailsConf.