OStatic

RailsConf, the main conference for the Ruby on Rails community, took place in Portland, Oregon over this past weekend. I wasn't able to attend, which is really a shame; I was at the first RailsConf in Chicago in 2006, and learned a great deal from the talks, as well as from the other Rails hackers in the audience. While the social aspects of a conference can't easily be recreated away from the conference, it is possible to watch and read a number of the presentations and lectures from RailsConf 2008. I have been doing that over the last few days, and have a few to recommend to other RailsConf-challenged fans.

The biggest news to come out of RailsConf, at least from the buzz, was the demo of Gemstone's Ruby environment ("MagLev"), which uses a Smalltalk virtual machine and object database. You can read a description of what they are doing, as well as an earlier interview with two of the main people behind MagLev. Well-known Rails experts Obie Fernandez wrote about it on his blog, as did Avi Bryant himself, on his blog. Of course, not everyone is enthusiastic, with Sho Fukamachi lashing out at the "naivete" of the Rails community.

Perhaps the biggest official news was the release of Rails 2.1. Of course, "Edge Rails" has been available for some time, meaning that the new features have been described on a number of blogs and other sites for a while. If you install the Ruby gem "rails", you will now be getting version 2.1 by default, which has the potential for causing trouble.

If you're interested in getting a video synopsis of what happened at the conference, try this page from RailsEnvy. Not only is it enjoyable to see and hear some of the biggest names in the Ruby community, but the video is fast-paced and fun, while touching on most of the major issues facing Rails developers.

Many of the presentations are available in PDF or PowerPoint format. Check out this site for a list. The topics include a large number of hot topics, from scaling to testing to version control with Git. But there were also some lower-level presentations, looking at topics such as JRuby "microapps," and creating profitable side projects.

I wouldn't ever say that reading presentations and watching videos is equivalent to attending a conference. But if you're an avid Rails developer, and (like me) weren't able to make it to RailsConf 2008, then these resources will at least give you a sense of what you missed, and what the important issues are for Rails developers to consider over the coming months.

• conference
• rails
• ruby