Last day of Rails Conf Europe 2008 (Day 1 & Day 2), and it's finally over!

David Black's opening session talked about Ruby and Rails Symposium: Versions, Implementations, and the Future. Here is a brief summary of MRI Ruby versions:

• Ruby 1.8.6
• Bread and butter for many of us
• 1.8.7
• 1.8 with lots of backported 1.9 features
• Help with migration to 1.9
• Not gaining traction, is it ?
• 1.9.0
• First release of 1.9
• Not particularly feature stable
• Not in wide production use.
• 1.9.1
• Feature freeze 9/25
• Release Christmas 2008 (planned)
• Expected to be more stable

The talk showed some of the new features coming up in Ruby 1.9.x. An informal survey of audience indicated the following numbers:

• 4 - How many are using 1.8.7 ?
• 98% - How many are using 1.8.6 ?
• 1 - How many are using 1.9.0 ?
• 4 - Tried 1.8.7 and not switching
• 3 - Tried 1.9 and not switching
• 85% - Never tried 1.9

JRuby is an alternative implementation of Ruby that runs on Java VM.  And when prompted, I quoted all the JRuby numbers (75% memory improvement with upcoming Rails 2.2, 33,000 assertions from Ruby Spec and 22,000 tests for Ruby 1.8.6 compliance, Ongoing work on Ruby 1.9 compliance). JRuby "It's just Ruby" - knowing Java is not a pre-requisite to run JRuby for your Ruby or Rails applications!

In Developing Ruby and Rails applications with the NetBeans IDE talk, Erno & Petr showed all the cool features of Ruby/Rails editing, syntax highlighting, debugging, project creation, refactoring and many more. You can find all about it here.

Rails powered by GlassFish talk was well attended. The slides are available here and if you attended the session, please rate it here. I value your feedback. Some of the excerpts from the talk are:

• GlassFish v3 Gem for development and deployment
• Auto-configure Runtime Pooling
• Rails deployment on GlassFish v3
• WAR-based deployment
• JDBC Connection Pooling
• Comet in Rails
• Popular Apps in Rails (Typo, Mephisto, Substuct, Redmine)
• JRuby/GlassFish Success Stories
• Hudson - Extensilbe CI Engine
• JRuby/GlassFish Endorsements
• FREE Rails/GlassFish hosting for 12 months
• Why Rails on GlassFish ?

Let us know by sending an email to webtier@glassfish.dev.java.net if you are using JRuby or GlassFish or JRuby and GlassFish in production. We'll be happy to feature you on blogs.sun.com/stories.

Rails 2.0.4 and 2.1.1 were released during the conference. Now I need to start working on all the different blogs promised earlier this week :)

Here are some pictures from Day 3:


And finally the complete photo album:




Next stop - Braaaazzzil!

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