Lone Star Ruby Conference Roundup

Posted by mhagedorn on September 9th, 2007 filed in Ruby

Well I just got back to Houston from the LSRC in Austin.  I really had a good time interacting with rubyists from all over the country.  Here are a few highlights:Rspec 
One of the latest tools to practice Behavior Driven Development is called RSpec.  It basically allows you to specify in plain english the way that objects in your program are supposed to behave (ok so its not plain english but it is much closer).   This allows your business people to help you write the specifications on how your program is supposed to work.   Writing these specifications first, and then writing the code to make the all the specifications pass.     The primary author of Rspec – David Chelimsky gave some really good demos of how to use Rspec, and showed how to hook in Autotest and Growl for instant continuous feedback of how your code is doing.  Autotest runs continuously in the background and runs Rspec on your code whenever code changes.  I am now starting a new project and David convinced me… I am using Rspec!
 I Built this Killer Rails Site, Now What? 
PJ Hyett of Err the Blog fame, gave a really good talk on how to approach marketing of a Rails website.  He touched on the following issues:SEO -(search engine optimization)

•  don’t use the standard urls Rails gives you, use descriptive ones (i.e. /authors/1, instead use /authors/joeblow or something like that)
• Set your titles on pages (rails seems to do a good job of this)
• Meta tags
• setting the rel=”nofollow” attribute on added hrefs (like for comments on a blog)  When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.  Google penalizes for spam links, so this can help that case.

Performance

•  Monit for monitoring – unix type systems only
• The default mysql config is slow.. check out Evan Weaver’s blog on mysql configuration
• Rick Olsen’s activerecordcontext plugin – simple object cacheing
• Rick Olsen’s cachefu plugin 
• Rick Olsen’s actsasversioned was also mentioned.. but I dont really see why that impacts performance in a positive way… but it was in my notes

Create a Community for your App

•  give your users a voice
• Add a forum/blog
• 5% of your users will give you 90% of your traffic so reward loyalty

 Singleton classes and the Metaclass
Patrick Farley gave a really good talk on the basics of what makes ruby work.  He showed a lot of C code, that explained a lot about how ruby inheritance works.   To be honest it was was a lot clearer when he showed the corresponding code in the JRuby codebase.  His description of how monkey patching works was really good.  Basically when you monkey patch a ruby class, an invisible class gets added to the class hierarchy that is the super class of your class.
Ruby as a Glue Language 
James Edward Gray II gave a talk on how its ok to shell out to the system to do various tasks.   The most interesting was generating a UUID.  Its really slow in ruby.. but by shelling out  like id=uuidgen. 
 Jay Philips gave a really good talk on his framework, Adhearsion to control the Asterisk server, which controls telephony. 
 Rick Olsen talked about how to manage attachments in rails apps.   He also talked about some really cool utilities like Appcast, a lightweight messaging framework, and ParkPlace a simulator of Amazon S3.  ActiveReload, his company has written lots of cool stuff.  Check out their website