Adaptive Path Blog

I attended O’Reilly’s RailsConf last week in Portland Oregon. What a difference a year makes. There were 550 attendees at last year’s sold out conference. This year’s conference, moved to a larger venue, also sold out early with a final head count of 1600 participants. It’s a testament to the continued growth of Rails as a platform and makes it clear that Rails isn’t going to disappear. Now that at week has slipped by, looking back at the conference I’m left with several distinct thoughts.

I presented a session on Design for Developers that was standing room only, clearly indicating a trend that I’ve been pointing to for the last couple of years. Rails, other similar frameworks, Ajax and the increasing adoption of Agile inspired development practices have pushed developers to work more and more closely with designers. With Rails in particular, developers often find themselves challenged directly with design questions. This has left a real thirst in the developer community in general and the Rails community in particular for guidance and information around issues of design. There’s a real opportunity for practitioners on both sides of the developer/designer divide to help each other work more effectively and share information.

Judging by the keynotes, there seemed to be a lot of concern about whether Rails is ready for the Enterprise or not. This echoed conversations at last years RubyConf as well. Maybe I’m not reading the right blogs but curiously, this question doesn’t seem to take up as much space in the general community dialog. I don’t know if it’s even the right question. An impromptu, raised hands survey during one of the keynotes revealed approximately a third of the attendees came from a Java background. As Java developers in enterprise become increasingly interested in and enamored by Rails, it will leak into the enterprise environment whether management wants it there or not. Initially small projects will get done in Rails where there is a management blind eye. With a foothold established, it will be easier to employ Rails as an approach to larger and larger projects. JRuby and the associated ability to deploy rails apps to existing Java application servers is only going to exacerbate this trend .

And finally…Twitter Twitter Twitter. It’s clear that Twitter is going to be the poster child of Rails scaling issues both good and bad. Scaling has always been a perceived achilles heel for Rails applications and Twitter’s tremendous growth has resulted in some visible hiccups. Progress has been clear though and it’s likely that were will be solutions for most of the Rails specific performance issues in the near future.

All in all, it was a great conference and a pleasure to participate. I can’t wait until next year’s.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Conference Commentary, Development, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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