Ruby and Rails DevRoom at fosdem 2009 Proposed schedule for Sunday 08/02/2009: There are talks of 25 minutes and of 40 minutes. In the schedule, 5 minutes buffer time is added to allow some Q/A and changing of laptops, so the total scheduled length becomes 30 and 45 minutes. 09:00 - 09:15 : start-up and introduction 09:15 - 10:00 : IronRuby (Ivan Porto Carrero) 10:00 - 10:30 : Prawn (Tom Klaasen) 10:30 - 11:00 : LogiLogi and Freedom on the Brave New Web (Wybo Wiersma) 11:00 - 11:15 : PAUZE 1 11:15 - 12:00 : MyOwnDB/Dedomenon (Raphael Bauduin) 12:00 - 12:30 : Developing Web applications with Wt::Ruby (Richard Dale) 12:30 - 13:30 : LUNCH 13:30 - 14:15 : On objects, classes, binding and scoping in Ruby (Peter Vanbroekhoven) 14:15 - 14:45 : Introduction to Sinatra (Koen Van der Auwera) 14:45 - 15:15 : Ruby and Java: What are the differences? (Jean-Baptiste Escoyez) 15:15 - 15:30 : PAUZE 2 15:30 - 16:15 : Internationalization in Rails 2.2 (Nicolas Jacobeus) 16:15 - 17:00 : Hosting ruby on rails (Bernard Grymonpon) IronRuby with .NET technologies (Ivan Porto Carrero) Speaker * name Ivan Porto Carrero * bio Ivan Porto Carrero is a passionate freelance developer in .NET and Ruby. Ivan has been developing C# for the last 6 years and Ruby for the last 3 years.  Ivan is also active in the community and started the .NET user group chapter in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Later he started an architects lunch meeting in Wellington, New Zealand. Ivan's background is primarily on the internet where he has been active for the biggest part of the last 10 years. He's currently writing a book for Manning on IronRuby (IronRuby in Action). For this book he has written an mvc framework for creating WPF/Silverlight applications. Session * title IronRuby with .NET technologies * duration 40 minutes * abstract ** A brief discussion of what the DLR is and what it brings to the table in .NET/MONO. ** Introduction on how IronRuby could possibly ease rails deployment on IIS Silverlight as cross-platform GUI toolkit. ** How to use silverlight to run ruby in the browser much like javascript ** Silverline: an integration for Silverlight with Rails. * links http://www.ironruby.net/ http://flanders.co.nz Prawn (Tom Klaasen) Speakers * name Tom Klaasen * bio Tom is a web application developer with a decade of experience. He started out with Java, and is since several years working with Ruby on Rails. He owns his own company, http://10to1.be. Session * title Prawn * duration 25 minutes * abstract Prawn is Ruby's solution to generate PDF files. In this talk, you'll get an overview of the history of the project, the direction it is going in, learn how to create PDFs with Ruby, and even get some code snippets to get you started! * links http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/ LogiLogi and Freedom on the Brave New Web (Wybo Wiersma) Speaker * name Wybo Wiersma * bio Wybo Wiersma is organizer of the Ruby User Group Groningen meeting, founder of the LogiLogi Foundation and a student in History, Philosophy and Information Science. He has written a FOSS computational linguistics toolset in Perl, a make-replacement that takes make- files that are pure C++, various smaller scripts (like a gallery generator, Tex footnote makeup, etc...) and has contributed to the WordNet::Similarity CPAN-lib. He has been using Rails and Ruby already for more than two years. Session * title LogiLogi and Freedom on the Brave New Web * duration 25 minutes * abstract The talk will be on several topics; On LogiLogi.org, a webplatform for philosophers written in Rails and on the LogiLogi Foundation which thinks Web-Applications should be Free Software too, that is Affero GPLed, if Free Software is to have a future on the Brave New Web. That is we should think beyond Stallman's: one should not rely on another’s machine to “do calculations with ones data”. Also by the end of january we will have extracted and released some gems and Rails plugins, one for creating Spam-free forms without captchas (in this way http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html) and yet another solution for the rounded corners problem (and scaling and resizing SVG back-ground images in general) using javascript and RMagick. We might at the end shortly demonstrate these too if the audience wishes. LogiLogi is a hypertext platform featuring a rating-system that models peer review and other valuable social processes surrounding academic writing (in line with Bruno Latour). Contrary to early websystems it does not make use of forum-threads (avoiding their many problems), but of tags and links that can also be added to articles by others than the original author. LogiLogi is a fully RESTfull Rails-app, which is Free Software. * links http://en.logilogi.org/ MyOwnDB/Dedomenon (Raphael Bauduin) Speaker * name Raphael Bauduin         MyOwnDB/Dedomenon * bio Raphaël has been active for some time in the Free and Open Source world, and is best known as founder of FOSDEM that he led until 2007, at which point he started Profoss, targetting professional users of ICT interested in Free and Open Source Software. He has also contributed with software, most notably having started and still leading the development of the open source Dedomenon engine, powering MyOwnDB.Com. Session * title Myowndb * duration 40 minutes * abstract Myowndb was launched early 2006 as one of the first Web databases exploiting Ajax to present its users with an easy to use interface. The software is based on Ruby on Rails and Postgresql, and is developed by Free and Open Source Software developers, who released the MyOwnDb.com engine under the AGPLv3 at dedomenon.org. This session will introduce you to the software,  show how it was developed with flexibility and extensibility in mind and how easy it is to adapt it to your own needs. * links http://www.dedomenon.org http://www.myowndb.com Developing Web applications with Wt::Ruby (Richard Dale) Speaker * name Richard Dale * bio Richard Dale has been working on various language bindings for the Qt and KDE apis since early 2000; including C, Objective-C, Java, Ruby and C#. The recently developed Wt::Ruby bindings are based on QtRuby, which in turn was based on the PerlQt language bindings code. Session * title Developing Web applications with Wt::Ruby * duration 25 minutes * abstract The Wt toolkit allows programmers to develop web applications in C++. It abstracts away the details of coding in HTML, JavaScript and CSS so that the developer can just work with widgets in a similar manner to the Qt library for desktop applications. When Wt is combined with Ruby via the Wt::Ruby bindings, it offers a very different approach to the more traditional Rails or ASP style approach based on web pages, where program code is embedded into HTML. The talk will discuss how Wt::Ruby works, give an overview of the api and how it can be used with FastCGI in an Apache server. There are many interesting possibilities to combine Rails technology, such as ActiveRecord or the ActiveSupport Ruby extensions, with Wt::Ruby and the talk would hope to inspire people to start experimenting.  * links http://github.com/rdale/wtruby On objects, classes, binding and scoping in Ruby (Peter Vanbroekhoven) Speaker * name Peter Vanbroekhoven * bio Peter has been a Ruby programmer from the days when 1.8.0 was the latest Ruby version and when Rails was still non-existing. Peter is currently working as full-time Ruby Developer at XaoP (http://www.xaop.com). XaoP manages to do all of their new projects --even for large multinationals-- in Ruby, to great joy of its employees. Even though XaoP builds its user interfaces with Rails, Peter's interests lie mostly with Ruby. Currently he is working on creating dynamic and fluid library interfaces to document management systems. Session * title On objects, classes, binding and scoping in Ruby * duration 40 minutes * abstract This presentation delves into Ruby's object model. Ruby's object model is class-based, so we cannot discuss objects without including classes. Next we discuss bindings and scoping in Ruby, which are somewhat related but still two different concepts. This presentation intends to go beyond the knowledge of the average Rubyist and aims to teach you more about the intricate details of how Ruby works and how you can exploit these to your advantage, even if just to wow (TM) your coworkers. * links http://www.xaop.com Introduction to Sinatra (Koen Van der Auwera) Speaker * name Koen Van der Auwera * bio Co-founder 10to1. Working with Java since 2000 and enjoying Ruby since 2005. Session * title Introduction to Sinatra * duration 25 minutes * abstract Sinatra is a Domain Specific Language(DSL) for quickly creating web-applications in ruby. It keeps a minimal feature set, leaving the developer to use the tools that best suit them and their application. With Sinatra you can build a web application in a single file, which makes it fun and easy to use. * links http://sinatra.rubyforge.org/ http://10to1.be Ruby and Java: What are the differences? (Jean-Baptiste Escoyez) Speaker * name Jean-Baptiste Escoyez * bio Jean-Baptiste is a web 2.0 technologies consultant at Belighted and blogger on Frailers.net. He is a 25 years old ruby-and-rails-enthusiast, enjoying working with Ruby/Rails at Belighted, a brand new web development startup. Moreover, he maintains Frailers.net, a blog about... (guess what) ... Ruby on Rails. He especially likes working on promising web 2.0 projects and teaching technologies. Session * title Ruby and Java: What are the differences? * duration 25 minutes * abstract Ruby is quite often presented as the Java successor. This is a highly controversial purpose. However, when you start a new project it can be important to know what are the advantages of these two great languages. In this talk, we will present their differences. Java is a well-established and well-known language. In opposite, Ruby is a rising star which is not mastered by everybody yet. When you start to develop a new project you have to make a language choice. It is not always easy to choose between learning an exciting new language or relying on a popular highly-used one. In this talk, I will discuss the pros and cons of Ruby and Java, what are the best trade-offs for your application and what are the performance differences. I will show that it is not that complicated to learn Ruby coming from Java. From a business point of view, I will also explain why a good language choice can help you saving money. Here is a brief talk summary :   * Ruby vs. Java syntax   * Interpreted or compiled languages   * Dynamic typing   * Metaprogramation   * Language related philosophies   * Performance comparison We will also have a quick peek at JRuby, the Ruby interpreter build upon JVM. * links: http://www.rubyrailways.com/sometimes-less-is-more/ http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2006/jw-0717-ruby.html http://www.dmh2000.com/cjpr/ Internationalization in Rails 2.2 (Nicolas Jacobeus) Speakers * name Nicolas Jacobeus * bio Nicolas is co-founder of Belighted, a web development company located in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and specialized in Ruby on Rails. He is also writer on Frailers.net, a documentation/community project for french-speaking Ruby on Rails developers. Session * title Internationalization in Rails 2.2 * duration 40 minutes * abstract This talk will discuss how the new i18n framework of Rails 2.2 eases the translation of rails applications in multiple languages. Probably the biggest new feature of Rails 2.2, released in November 2008, is its integrated internationalization framework, which ends a complicated past of many incompatible solutions based on various gems and plugins. This talk will discuss the various following topics: * a brief recap of the history of i18n in rails * an explanation what the new framework does: ** the API and its implementations ** translation files ** namespaces ** interpolation and pluralization * a small demo of how to use the framework * a presentation of plugins available to extend the framework * a list of valuable external resources * links http://rails-i18n.org/ http://www.belighted.com http://www.frailers.net Hosting Ruby on Rails (Bernard Grymonpon) Speakers * name Bernard Grymonpon * bio Bernard is one of the co-founders of Openminds. Openminds has practical experience deploying Rails code and has engineered and debugged several non-trivial setups. Openminds hosts many Rails sites, from simple blogs and one-shot projects up to full-blown server-wide projects. Session * title Hosting ruby on rails * duration 40 minutes * abstract Real-life experiences in designing, engineering and supporting hosting environments. Choosing the right technologies, tying them together and debugging errors in the stacks. Practical examples, benchmarks and code-snippets to inform and entertain... * links http://www.wonko.be http://www.openminds.be