RailsConf 2009 Notes

Tuesday 05/12/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

Can someone smell stale blog?  It's been busy on this side and I haven't had any blogworthy material for awhile...until now.

I had the opportunity to go to RailsConf last week in Las Vegas.   A lot of smart people, an overwhelming array of Apple products and geeky shirts, and tons of nerdy sessions.

Here are some brief notes from the conference:

jQuery on Rails

• good review of basic jquery selectors and more advanced DOM selectors like siblings(), nextall(), find(), filter()
• .live() can bind events after elements are added (new with jQuery 1.3)
• http://plugins.jquery.com/project/metadata/

• <div data="{some: 'data'}">

• $("div").metadata().some // returns 'data'

• Rails 3 will implement unobtrusive js

Rack

• Rack is a generic interface for Ruby and Ruby frameworks
• provides a standard interface for creating middleware that gets run going down the stack
• sample basic Rack: http://gist.github.com/110847
• use case: progressive caching - middleware that holds a session and allows cached page to dynamically load personalized content
• use case: Twitter "embiggener" - a middleware that Twitter could use to replace all tinyurls with full urls
• http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/24/And the Greatest of These Is ___ Rack Support Presentation.pdf

Sinatra

• Sinatra is a DSL (domain specific language) built on top of Rack for creating web apps in Ruby
• not an MVC architecture.  routes are matched directly in the file and execute the enclosing block
• templates can be haml, erb, inline, or in-file
• gives a basic environment for app development without the whole stack
• sample: http://github.com/jzting/flickr_original_sinatra/blob/efbf3e195a242dba04c22491569e51caa12eed77/flickr_sinatra.rb

Rails 3 - some new features

• XSS protection: auto-escaped by default
• use <%=raw %> to force raw
• UJS finally!
• html5 style data-foo attributes so will validate but can also be accessed by any JS library
• cleaner router

UI fundamentals for programmers

• terseness is not a value for ui design.  need explanation!
• "from the customer's point of view, the UI is the entire application"
• separate screens into REST-named conventions (new/index/show/edit)
• focus on the inside-out, content that matters first!
• "we should really have a weak tag" when applying least effective difference principle
• don't be clever by extracting html into helpers--things can change and need flexibility
• separate CSS and JS for separate actions

JS testing

• it is possible!
• http://github.com/relevance/blue-ridge/tree/master provides a set of tools for rspec-style unit testing

Chris Wanstrath (github) keynote

• focus on writing and releasing code, not on trying to become a "rock star" or "ninja"
• find a need and fulfill it, reduce friction
• https://gist.github.com/0a2655aed6a26fa15a02

Twitter on Rails

• TwitterAuth plugin makes it really easy to use the oauth in your application for SSO functionality
• speaker livecoded this: http://twisteners.heroku.com/users/jzting

JRuby on Google App Engine

• it's possible! takes quite a bit of footwork to set up though.
• limitations: no sockets, writing to filesystem, must use Google's DB system
• worth keeping an eye on in the future as a deployment option

Mountable apps in Rails 3

• will enable multiple apps that can share functionality
• a more versatile pluggable architecture (think Drupal/Wordpress-like plugins)
• example: an auth component that can be used as a SSO gatekeeper across different components (blog, admin section, etc)

Compass

• a CSS meta-framework that uses haml and sass
• can integrate popular frameworks like 960, YUI, Blueprint
• can create reusable mixins, constants
• export as expanded, compact, or compressed
• http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass

MacRuby

• a version of Ruby 1.9 that runs on top of Mac OS core frameworks
• Ruby types are ported to their Cocoa equivalent: string = NSString, array = NSArray, etc...
• so you can use Cocoa methods in addition to Ruby methods
• you can use Interface Builder like normal and use Ruby classes to power the interface