First up: RailsConf Europe 2008 will be in Berlin again. Woot!
As I wrote yesterday, Marcel Molina and Michael Michael Koziarski did a little Best Practices session for a starters. Other than that, day two was only okay.
Ola Bini repeated in his JRuby talk pretty much what Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo said on the first day, plus some shameless ThoughtWorks pluck.
I did enjoy the talk on Selenium by Till Vollmer. It’s been on my list for a while, and it does look quite interesting. The questions that pop up in my head as a friend of continuous integration is of course how to automate this. But I’ll just have to read up on that.
Ben Nolan (creator of Behaviour.js) showed some neat tricks using functional programming with JavaScript. He brought up some ideas and showed code, which I very much appreciated. Nothing new for the JavaScript cracks really, but still interesting.
Jay Fields talked about the presenter pattern in Rails. I bet a lot of people thought after the talk: wtf? To sum up his findings on the presenter pattern in Rails were rather negative and probably not what a lot of people expected. I found his talk to be a change to the others. It’s not always the success stories that make you push hard, but also down-falls, even if they’re small ones. He put up all the details in his blog. Definitely worth checking out.
In all I would’ve wished for more detail in the presentations. A lot of the presenters spent too much time introducing things, presenting theory, and so on. More code please, people! When people come to the RailsConf I take it for granted they know Rails enough to get down and dirty immediately.
As DHH wrote on his blog I too was quite impressed by the engagement of Sun in Ruby and Rails. Craig McCanahan (of Struts fame) talked about it and said he can’t imagine going back to Java for web development after having worked with Rails. Amen to that.
I got some nice ideas and things to look into out of it, but I have hoped for more. But still I’m looking forward to next year.