Gluttonous

Dave Thomas Keynote

Posted by kev Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:37:00 GMT

What a year

• 21 million hits on Google
• Sidebar (how google makes their money) Advertising
  • Hosting
  • Training
  • Consulting
  • Custom project work
  • 65% of the No Fluf speakers are doing Rails work
  • Commercial IDEs for Rails
  • Most significant, ALTERNATIVES to Ruby on Rails
• Rubyforge Downloads
  • Rails - 536,835 downloads
• Ratings
  • Google Trends
    • Constantly increasing graph
    • In comparison to Websphere which is declining and evening out
    • Similar situation with jboss
    • We’ve passed Tapestry
    • We passed the “spring framework” a long time ago
    • We’ve passed zend
• Thanks core!
• Thanks Matz!
• Everything is Perfect! BUT
  • Some work still needs doing
  • Hilbert, a mathmetician, gave a keynote analyzing the 23 most important unsolved problems in mathematics, setting the stage for the next century

23 Unsolved Problems Ran for about 7.5 hours, so…

3 Problems

• PDI - Please Do Investigate
  • A bit rude
  • BUT, they’re right. There’s only 12 of them.
  • We’re all programmers. Try to implement it. It’s open.
  • The responsibility to make Rails the way we want is up to us.

Data Integration

• Better use of schema - use schema constraints
  • Validation based on the schema (staying DRY)
  • Work with database foreign keys
    • It will help with enterprise integration
    • Make it easy to define in migrations
    • Add belongs_to if FK detected
    • Generally make folks feel we care
• Primary keys
  • Better support for non-integer keys
    • Particularly in migrations
• Add support for composite primary keys
• Support distributed transactions
• Standardized attribute-based finders
• Non-database models (including JMS/MQ)

Real-world CRUD

• The Irony - Scaffolding brings people to Rails BUT it’s the worst of Web 1.0
• We need something that really handles the database
• Support for table relationships
• Configurability
• In browser validation
• AJAX!
• Cross application skinning
• What We’re Doing
  • Bring the simplicity of Active Record to Views and Controllers

Deployment

• What do you do on the server?
  • Lightty, Mongrel, Apache, handling zombies?
• Capistrano
  • Best deployment system there is
  • Lets make it better
  • Push model
    • Application contains all of the configuration information
    • What, where, how and when of deployment
    • Great when you own the entire development
    • BUT, in the real world responsibilities are split
    • Developers know what to deploy
    • Server administrators know where when and how
• Capistrano II
  • Cooperative development
  • Decouple application requirements and server environments
  • Application Config
    • Where to find files
    • Where to put files
    • Pre and post development hooks
    • Library and environment prereqs
  • Server Config
    • Nominate server roles
    • Where files go on the server
    • User names/permissions/security
    • Including database passwords etc
  • Deployment
    • Set up server once
    • Set up individual applications as needed
    • cap --deploy-on cap://server.com
    • Sends application config to server
      • Server checks dependencies, etc
    • Stages application to server(s)
    • Installs (or not)
    • Then..
    • ISPs set up standard environment
    • Developers and users deploy:
    • svn co http://typosphere.org/typo cd typo cap --deploy-on cap://my.isp.com/dave
    • No more cron jobs for dead processes
    • Packaging
    • One step further…
      • Deploy from GEMS
      • Rails equivalent of WAR files
      • Deploy from GEM using:
      • gem deploy name --on cap://my.isp.com
      • gem update name --on cap://my.isp.com

Why?

• We feel sorry for them
• I couldn’t do Java development anymore
  • Rails and Ruby have corrupted me
• It’s really hard to go back after Rails
• I’d like the Rails community to embrace these people
  • Meet them halfway
  • Support what they need for the transition
• All developers deserve to be happy