Peter Vandenabeele

I attended the 4 presentations in the Ruby on Rails DevRoom on fosdem 2008:

• 11:00: Peter Vandenabeele and Koen Van der Auwera, “Using Rails for agile development of a job site”
• 12:00: Jean-Baptiste Escoyez and Nicolas Jacobeus, “RESTful best practices”
• 14:00: Bernard Dubuisson, “CSA on Rails : a practical case-study”
• 15:00: Koen Van der Auwera, “Shoes, a tiny ruby GUI toolkit”

I took the picture below during the second talk (listed below for download). During the first, second and fourth presentation, about 100 persons where in the room (all seats where occupied + 20 people standing on the left and 15 people standing on the right). During the third presentation, approx. 50 people where present. A number of people tried to enter the room, but did not enter as it was completely full.

I published the first part of the presentation about http://allejobsinleuven.be on slideshare. Just in case that download doesn't work it is also available here.

The second part of that presentation (by Koen Van der Auwera) is linked from this blog entry. The fourth presentation (also by Koen) is linked from this blog entry by Koen.

The other presentations will hopefully be published soon on the pages of the Belgian Ruby and Rails User Group (the BRUG).

No comments on the first presentation (but some other persons did comment :-)).

The second presentation (RESTful Rails) was very interesting to get a quick explanation about REST and how it is implemented in Rails (not entirely following the theory and still a subject of discussion in the core Rails team; e.g. in some cases such mutiple deletes from a list or in the user registration process sending a mail with an confirmation URL (triggers a GET that changes state on the server), the RESTful theory is not entirely respected).

The third presentation (Rails at CSA) was the view from a project manager, turned developer, that used Rails for a an efficient and successful redesign of an existing web site (the migration with existing users and traffic went without problems).

The fourth presentation (Shoes) show the extreme simplicity of making a simple GUI application with Shoes. Koen also announced Shy (a single file distribution of a Shoes program).

Very successful, we hope to repeat or improve on this next year :-)

Many thanks to Peter Vanbroekhoven from XAOP for doing most of the preparation work for this successful new DevRoom.