andrew carter

The first day of sessions is over. The keynote was a mixed bag. Tim O’Reilly sometimes seems a little out of his depth but he is good at putting a label on things. His theme this year is evolving the definition of open source beyond the software distributed on to your machine and encompassing services. In fact, the emphasis on services throughout the keynote was very clear.

I had an idea of which talks I wanted to hear but made some last minute adjustments. I went to more Ruby talks than I originally planned. I’m starting to get the Ruby on Rails religion a little bit. I’m impressed with how it is evolving past the initial hype stage. There are some growing pains like disagreement on what to add to Rails (well covered elsewhere). But it does seem like people are looking to justify and use it as a tool to dramatically cut time and costs.

I picked up three things I want to explore in more depth:

• Capistrano - This looks like a compelling toolkit. It is skewed towards Rails but there is potential to use it in other contexts. We are looking to improve our deployment strategy for a mix of Java and Ruby on Rails. This could be a nice tool to add.
• Design by Contract - This is probably an old concept but Ruby is giving it a new life. Basically, it’s more a way of thinking of the problem differently. Replacing test/verification/assertion with specification/expectations. I like this line of thinking. It helps you filter out what you should write a test for and lets you not write tests you don’t need. The RSpec framework is an intriguing tool for doing this.
• Ruby on Rails in the Back Office - Obie Fernandez of ThoughtWorks had a good case study of using Rails to solve a set of problems for banking giant Barclay’s. They did it for a fraction of the time and cost. More specifically, they put Rails in a place that isn’t what comes immediately to mind. And they also generated a DSL that allowed the account manager to directly input rules in Ruby. This was a non-programmer that was able to express the rules in some very readable Ruby metaprogramming. Powerful stuff.

The only talk I didn’t like was one by a product manager from Dell on virtualization. He showed some lame Windows media movies on running Xen and gave the marketing buzz speak. Dell may benefit from the move to virtualization but I wouldn’t look to them for any sort of thought leadership.