Blog

• Subscribe now for the 2010 edition!

  Posted on 21 July 2010

  The 2010 edition of RubyEnRails will be held on 21 & 22 October 2010 at Pakhuis de Zwijger, behind central station in Amsterdam. The name of the conference has changed from RubyEnRails to RubyAndRails Europe. You can get your ticket for the 2010 edition at http://rubyandrails.eu

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• Added more video's to our Vimeo Channel

  Posted on 12 December 2009

  Be sure to check out our official Vimeo Channel
  All the talks are available online now.

  ReR09 – Yehuda Katz, Merging Rails from Internetbureau Holder on Vimeo.

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• Video's are online

  Posted on 07 December 2009

  Yes, it sure took a while but they are online! We have 13 full length high quality video’s for you available. Enough for you to re-renjoy this years RubyEnRails conference this holiday season.. :-)

  ReR09 – Jeremy Kemper – Rails 3 from Internetbureau Holder on Vimeo.

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• Join DevGroups!

  Posted on 03 November 2009

  
  Within the next couple of weeks dev-groups.org, a new community initiative,
  plans to have their website up and running for members, organisers, and presenters of all types of user groups to help foster awareness and communication.

  Although the site will initially focus on ruby, the idea is to share it with other communities, including java, php, perl, python and cocoa.

  dev-groups need your help though, if it be spreading the word, helping with development, or design and frontend tlc (tender love and care), so if you are interested get involved!

  So contact the dev-groups core team by visiting their website and sending them an email.

  This isn’t their site, its everyones!

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• Lessons learned while building omroep.nl by Bart Zonneveld & Sjoerd Tieleman

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  Bart Zonneveld and Sjoerd Tieleman gave a presentation on their experiences on their project building omroep.nl. omroep.nl is a famous website which shows all the television broadcastings, news, twitter messages from people who are twittering about programs, a television guide and a lot more. The challenge of omroep.nl was that almost all the data comes from external sources. During the development of this website (which took only 6 months) Bart and Sjoerd came across a lot of problems. This presentation was about explaining how they solved these problems.

  The problems that occured in omroep.nl were a lot of caching problems and reading in bad external files like rss feeds. One nice solution they had with caching rss feeds was that they didn’t expire caches, but they overide the caches, so it can’t crash when the external webservers aren’t responding.

  One part of the presentation was about performance testing and monitoring their application with tools like New Relic, ab, httperf, autobench and cURL.

  In the end, the conclusion they gave the audience is:

  • Cache the crap out of everything (especially the homepage)
  • Don’t cache forms
  • Rescue everything
  • Test everything (frontend and backend)

  They ended their presentation with explaining a nice tool they made (you can ask them if you want to have it). The tool is called Cucumber Salad and with that tool you can run your tests in parallel so you dont have to wait that long for them to finish.

  UPDATE: Slides of our talk can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/tieleman/lessons-learned-while-building-omroepnl

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• Justin Halsall about DSL's for the front-end of Rails

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  Soon to be Fronteers MC Justin Halsall gave a fun presentation about DLS’s for the front-end. His entrance wasn’t like any other at the ReR 2009 Conf: with MJ’s Thriller at the background Justin enters the auditorium in a dark blue cloak as The Phantom Of The Opera. He tried to keep the mask on during his talk, but at was just too hot :D

  With DHH as God:
  

  and DHH as the devil:
  

  Justin kept his presentation amusing. He used a small demo application in which he shows repetitive code when displaying lists. To keep the code readable and DRY he uses the block_helpers gem. This makes it possible to code on a DSL-like way. Maybe a point worth mentioning about the GitHub example: it’s better to use partial rendering in the display method.

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• DataMapper

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  Dirkjan Bussink gave a talk about DataMapper. It is not just another ORM, it also works with other backends beside relational databases, like IMAP, YAML and it could also work easily with document databases. Recently, version 0.10 is released. With over 11 months of work, it works with Ruby versions like 1.8, 1.9 and JRuby and relational databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and Oracle.

  Compared to ActiveRecord, DataMapper has some very interesting features. Such as identity mapping. Meaning that if you fetch a certain object twice, for example Person.get(1), it will give the exact same ruby object and not two different objects reflecting the same database object. DataMapper also tries do to as much as late as possible, so it will only execute the database query untill it really needs the data.

  Because of this last feature, DataMapper is even smart enough to know how to combine two seperate queries into one if they are chained together and as long as it hasn’t fetched the data yet. This results in very advanced new features which will make it possible to support substraction, intersection and union on DataMapper collections.

  Lots of cool features are made available as plugins. For example validatons, those can be created to support both Ruby based validations as well as database constraints. There’s also a plugin for auto timestamps, to get the same effect ActiveRecord gives you when you have created_at and updated_at fields. This is all made possible through a clean internal API to communicate with the lower levels of DataMapper directly.

  Visit the website, the git repository, google groups or join irc to get more involved.

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• dev-groups.org

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  

  Within the next couple of weeks dev-groups.org, a new community initiative, plans to have their website up and running for members, organisers, and presenters of all types of user groups to help foster awareness and communication.

  Although the site will initially focus on ruby, the idea is to share it with other communities, including java, php, perl, python and cocoa.

  dev-groups need your help though, whether it be spreading the word, helping with development, or design and frontend tlc (tender love and care), so if you are interested get involved!

  Contact the dev-groups core team by visiting their website and sending them an email.

  This isn’t their site, its everyones!

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• What's hot in Rails 3 by Jeremy Kemper

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  As last but most certainly not least, Rails Core Member Jeremy Kemper finished up the first day of the ReR 2009 Conf with his keynote.

  He began his talk about the beauty of Ruby coding, about it’s simplicity: “to code only what matters”. No unnecessary words, well except for the ‘end’ keyword ;) Ruby brings joy to programming again and Rails brings joy to the web. But despite this powerful combination, the relationship between their communities isn’t that healthy at times. With it’s fast popularity and growth, Rails doesn’t seem to fit into the all so pieceful scenery that the Ruby community prefers. Jeremy would like to see this love-hate relationship to be a “love only relationship” again.

  

  Of course Jeremy continued his talk with Rails 3, about the “revolutionary merge” between Rails with Merb. Not only on code philosophy, but also between the Rails and Merb community. Having best of both worlds (Yehuda gave also us an insight earlier at that day), a summary:

  • Speed – Because of the adaption of Merb’s modularity, the performance increased dramatically. Jeremy showed the graph of Rails 2 versus Rails 3 and also Rails 3 on Ruby 1.8 versus 1.9.
  • Data retrieval – Rails 3 introduces ARel (Relational Algebra for Ruby), a project forked of Brynary’s Arel. It simplifies query generation and adapts to various RDBMS systems. ARel contributes to the ORM agnosticism.
  • Framework agnosticism – Not only is Rails 3 agnostic for ORM’s, but also for test frameworks, Javascript frameworks and templating engines.
  • Modularity – Like Yehuda, Jeremy gave us a peek into the modularity of the framework code and talked about Rails Metal being obsolete in the future.
  • Ruby versions – Jeremy talked about the rigid migration from 1.8 to 1.9 in the Rails community and he stimulates plugin authors to take the step of being compatible with Ruby 1.9. He would like to see Rails 3 running on Ruby 1.9 in the nearby future.

  Overall, the talk was really inspiring and gives the Rails community the duty of contributing to the Ruby 1.8 to 1.9 migration.

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• MongoDB On Rails!

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  Michael Dirollf gave the first talk on the second day of the RubyEnRails conference. While the contestants of the rumble where cracking their minds on how to do the assignment,
  Michael explained in his talk what MongoDB is and how the architecture is designed.

  In the first part of the talk he explained what MongoDB is and how it compares with some other systems like memcached and RDBMS. He also explained what the difference is between CouchDB and MongoDB. The main difference between these two systems is that MongoDB has better support for dynamic queries because you don’t need the indexes to be defined in advance. Another difference is that MongoDB uses a different replication approach.

  The second part gave an in-depth explanation on how MongoDB works with a ruby example. In Ruby, the data in MongoDB is represented as a hash. A hash with data can be saved to the database. MongoDb uses a so called Binary JSON format to save the data. This means that the data is converted to a binary format and then saved in the database. There are several predefined functions to use MongoDB in Rails. Also there are some additional mappers for MongoDB in rails like MongoMapper, Mongoid and MongoRecord.

  The last part of the presentation was about sharding. A system to support ‘Infinite scalability’. Sharding means that you define a sharding key (or keys) and the data will be split up in different chunks based on that key (e.g. posts created in the last week). This makes finding documents very fast because the system nows where the chunk is saved according to the key value in the query.

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• Tuning your Rails application by Bart ten Brinke

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  “Tuning your Rails application – to measure is to know”

  

  Bart ten Brinke gave his presentation yesterday about Tuning your rails application. A very interesting talk about what can go wrong with an application and how to debug, solve and maintain it. Bart started with some basic problems that can accure during a production environment.

  Bart came with some nice solutions to monitor your application. His favorite tool was Nagios. A monitor tool which called him out of bed last sunday on 3 o clock, Strange but true :) Some more monitoring tools came accross, Munin, Exception notification, Hoptoad and a really nice tool New Relic.

  A very interesting item on this presentation was the plugin Bart made called Request Log Analyzer A plugin which helps you with reading your log files. With just some simple commands you can have all the data you need from your log files. You can specify which controller or action to observe. It is also possible to specify timestamps. Definitely an awesome tool!

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• RubyEnRails Rumble Repositories

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  Leon and Klaas-Jan: http://github.com/LeipeLeon/Dev-Enter
  Eloy and Manfred: http://github.com/Fingertips/apprise
  Tom-Eric and Michel: http://github.com/i76/rrrer2009
  Ludo and Michel: http://github.com/ludo/rerr2009
  Marcel and Lain: http://github.com/Thyraon/rer09

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• Let's get ready to Rumble!!!

  Posted on 31 October 2009

  The Rails Rumble ‘09 has just kicked off, woohoo! All the teams have been briefed and they’ll have to prove their capabilities as rapid Rails programmers today. The scoring of their products will be twofold:

  • The RubyEnRails visitors can vote for the teams at Twitter as the teams present their products at the end of the day.
  • Our jury, consisting out of Jeremy Kemper, Yehuda Katz, Stephan Kaag and Chiel Wester, will judge the code.

  The presentations will be held around 16.45 o’clock. So wish them all good luck and most of all… don’t forget to vote for them later on Twitter today!

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• Genetic Algorithms with Ruby by Julian Fischer

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Julian Fischer, CEO of Avarteq GmbH starts his presentation with some basic knowledge about Evolution(Mutation, Recombination with the fittest, etc.) After this Julian explained about the famous Travelling Salesman Problem

  The interested part of the presentation was the final ruby program that visualised the Solution of the Travelling Salesman Problem with a Genetic Algorith.

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• MacRuby and RubyCocoa

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Eloy Duran, self called spec- bitch from fngtps is the next speaker. He provides a general status overview of RubyCocoa and MacRuby.

  With RubyCocoa being based on Ruby 1.8, MacRuby, the next generation, is based on Ruby 1.9.

  In a live coding session Eloy shows us code examples and how each object in MacRuby in build on top of NSObject.
  A benchmark shows us that MacRuby in fact can be much faster than both Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9. Unfortunately that’s not (yet) the case in all situations.
  With an example of MacRubyC, Eloy shows us how to generate an exectuble based on a Ruby source file.

  Ending with a live coding session in XCode Eloy shows us one more time how much potential MacRuby has.

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• jQuery on Rails by Stijn Mathysen

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Our Belgian friend Stijn just gave an insightfull presentation about jQuery on Rails. At first, he introduced jQuery with some basics such as (jQuery/CSS) selectors, event binding and chaining.
  As you could expect, he made a small comparison of Prototype vs jQuery implementations in which you can see that chaining contributes a lot for minimal amount of code.

  He continued his presentation by demonstrating jQuery goodness in his “Villains versus Heroes” ;) Rails app. Stijn demonstrated the amount of inline Javascript Rails certain helper functions produce which isn’t that pretty. So he explained how to neat this up using jQuery implementations; a summary:

  • replacing link_to with :method => “delete” and :confirm => … with bind and live
  • replacing form_remote_tag with ajaxForm
  • using jQuery UI (the Scriptaculous equivalent)
  • using jRails a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails
  • using Jzip for merging and minifying Javascript on a SASS method by Paul Engel
  • how to ‘pass’ the Rails form_authenticity_token the right way as follows:

  <script type="text/javascript">
    rails_authenticity_token = '<%= form_authenticity_token %>'
  </script>

  
  All in all, a good presentation which makes it worth to take a look at jQuery (if you haven’t already).

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• Rubyists.eu

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Julio Javier Cicchelli, ACDC lover, starts with a general outline of Europe and how much the collaboration between people with the same interests has evolved.
  In an attempt to help Ruby- lovers finding each other even better he created rubyists.eu. A place where rubyists meetup and share their knowledge.

  I suggest you check that site out and add your community to the list, if it ain’t already!

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• DRYing up your views by Dax Huiberts

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Our dear friend and college Dax Huiberts did his presentation about “Writing clean DRY views”.

  The presentation begins with “use partials in your views”. For all the html which gets repeated, DRY it up and write a partial!.

  Dax talks about “Haml loving”. Dax explains why he loves Haml so much and why everybody should use Haml. Haml is basicly a more cleaner way to make html instead of using the erb template language. The sourse is indentation and is closer to the css way of writing code. Especially with SASS , Haml is a perfect way to write html with css.

  The next topic is about the Formtastic form builder. A nicer way to build your Forms in Rails. Dax shows some forms build in the old way and with some magic transformed them into forms which only have around 4 lines of codes. This topic ends up with a Formtastic form in Haml which has 3 lines of code.

  After the formtastic part Dax talks about cleaning your views with block helpers. Block helpers gives you the possibility to render content in wrappers like a rounded or shadowed box using the form_tag way.

  Also a nice part of the presentation goes about Presenters With presenters it is possible to extract the logic needed for complex views in a separate class. How Dax said it beautifully “With Presenters you keep logic in it’s rightful place”. What is nice too is that you can make methods that looks like model methods but with controller data. For example the current_user methods.

  A nice example which Dax provided:

  <%= link_to “Edit”, @topic if @topic.can_edit? %>

  and your method could be:

  def can_edit?
  @topic.creator == @current_user && @current_user.is_admin?
  end

  This ended the presentation. The conclusion was very clear. DRYup your views!

  
  Dax in action!

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• Rails Security by Jonathan Weiss

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Next up is Jonathan Weiss from Peritor, well known in the community because of Webistrano.

  Jonathan turns out to be quite a security-guru and learned us first that RoR error pages and HTTP Server headers can tell you a lot about the servers Rails environment.
  All the security related buzz-words are being talked about including the safety of the cookie session storage, session fixation, cross site scripting and SQL injection.
  And luckily he provides us solutions for each mentioned possible security issue.

  Another subtopic is Javascript Hijacking. By redefining certain Javascript functions the behaviour of a website can be altered.
  With Johantan’s last subject ‘Mass Assignment’ a good general overview is being given of security issues that can occur in your Rails site and how to deal with them.

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• Yehuda looks back at merging Merb goodness into Rails

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  After putting a lot of hard work into Rails 3 by the Rails Core Team and being near the other side of the tunnel, Yehuda Katz looked back at the process at RER 2009.

  As we all know, Ruby On Rails has grew up a lot during the last couple of years. This came with a price; by adding new features, the code became more complex and certain concepts were being mixed. The Core Team decided to start a big clean up which Rails 3 embodies and this is where Merb hooks in as it has a lot of framework goodness. The improvements in a nutshell:

  • The Rails code is more modulair which makes it easier to understand the Rails code and you’ll get the possibility of requiring only the specific Rails functionality you want.
  • The partial rendering performance has been improved which makes the rendering up to 10 times faster.
  • Rails 3 is ORM (and Javascript library) agnostic which gives you the freedom to use any ORM other than ActiveRecord, such as Datamapper and CoucheDB.
  • Gem dependencies management (with the new Bundler) and routing are set up a lot better and clear.

  This all being said, upgrading from Rails 2 to 3 isn’t done easy though (yet :D). But hopefully it will be later on. To wrap it all up, it was a very interesting and pleasant presentation by Yehuda. I can’t wait for using Rails 3 myself!

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• Pictures already available on Flickr!

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Check Flickr for images!

  

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• Pres #1: Advanced testing

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  Since Yehuda is delayed, the first presentation of today is about ‘Advanced Testing’.

  Edwin Vlieg from Moneybird first talks about testing in general. He explains unit tests, test driven development and behaviour driven development.

  After that, he continues about the Rails extensions webrat and factorygirl.
  His general approach in testing is to only test the model files and to not waste time trying to test everything.

  On the statement that there is no need to test authorization, because a plugin already handles that, questions do arise from the audience. I tried moneybird.nl/admin and no admin panel showed up so I guess he’s right ;-)

  

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• Kick off

  Posted on 30 October 2009

  After everyone grabbed their cup of coffee and received their badgets RubyEnRails 2009 just got kicked of!
  In a crowded ‘Auditorium’ we just listened to the introduction of Wilco.

  It appears first scheduled speaker Yehuda Katz is slightly delayed so Edwin Vlieg from MoneyBird will open up first with his presentation.

  Some people got trouble accessing the conference network. If you are one of them: there is a WIFI setting support group. Just ask someone with a ‘Holder’ shirt for support.

  Have a nice first conference day!

  

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• It's a beautiful day!

  Posted on 29 October 2009

  To start a conference! Tonight the first beers will be drunk because of RubyEnRails 2009 Amsterdam. We have 17 speakers lined up for you the two coming days. Varying from Jeremy Kemper to Dax Huiberts (of RADRace fame ;-)).

  Follow the Twitter backchannel to see where everybody is coming from. Check out @PanosJee from Greece or @mislav from Slovenia, the’re already on their way to Amsterdam. Let us know where you at by tagging your tweet with #rer2009!

  On this weblog we will be live blogging the events, with pictures, movies and other fun stuff. So stay tuned.

  Official twitter back channel

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• 5 RER Rumble teams competing for a RailsConf ticket

  Posted on 28 October 2009

  At the moment five teams will be competing in the RubyEnRails Rumble: @leipeleon and @kjw, @micheldegraaf and @ludooo, @iain_nl and @marceldegraaf, @manfreds and @alloy, @tomeric and @rhynix.

  Follow them today to keep on track with their Rumble updates! The Rumble starts saturday 8:30.

  Start bribing Yehuda Katz, as he will be one of the jurors..

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• Schedule available online

  Posted on 22 October 2009

  While we have only a few tickets left october 30th is closing in. About time to reveal the schedule! We have three official side events, a pre-party on thursday. Drinks on friday and a geek dinner on saturday. Side events a free to attend but please register! Presentation subjects are on its way, please be a bit more patient.

  So go ahead and pick a talk of your liking and sign up for the side events!

  Update! The schedule now shows the topics of the talks too!

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• Only 50 tickets left!

  Posted on 19 October 2009

  The conference is only 11 days away and ticket sales are going great. At the moment we only have 50 tickets left, we except to be sold out soon! So please remind your friends and collegues to buy a ticket while they can.

  Please sign up today!

  This year’s event will also include a couple of side events, there’s Amsterdam.rb on thursday a geek dinner on saturday and lots of other fun events. And of course, Amsterdam is a great place to visit anyway!

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• Check out our proud sponsors

  Posted on 07 October 2009

  Organizing the RubyEnRails conference wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsors. Please pay their website a visit and use their services!

  • JetBrains-RubyMine
  • Nedap Healthcare
  • Kabisa ICT
  • Hogeschool van Amsterdam
  • Internetbureau Holder
  • Engine Yard

  Last couple of days, we have added Engine Yard and Kabisa ICT to our list, a warm welcome to them.

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• Follow us on Twitter: RubyEnRails

  Posted on 02 October 2009

  The subject says it all.. :-) http://twitter.com/rubyenrails/ In case you: hate RSS, want to use Twitter for everything or like to receive updates about an event late October.

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• The RubyEnRails Rumble!

  Posted on 02 October 2009

  This year we will be hosting our first RubyEnRails Rumble! The RERR is a competition in which a team of two has to try to finish a small assignment by using Ruby/Rails and relating plugins and tools. The competition will end end the of the Geek day, you will have a total of about 6 hours.

  With this competition you can show your programming skills and maybe promote you own shop! At the end of the day a jury of experienced programmers will examine your project and pick a winner. Interested in entering this competition, please send us an e-mail!

  The RERR will be part of our second ‘Geek’ day. Buy your ticket now…

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• All talks in English!

  Posted on 25 September 2009

  Last night we received an e-mail from Anthony: “I’d like to come to RER this year but I was wondering about the percentage of talks in dutch.”

  Well Anthony.. Of course! All the sessions will be in English, friday and saturday.

  We are running out of ticket fast. We have a small but cozy venue, come and check it out!

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• An European RubyAndRails event!

  Posted on 21 September 2009

  This is going to be a true European edition of RubyAndRails Amsterdam. At the moment we have speakers and attendees from over 6 different EU countries! It’s going to be big fun! Of course is Amsterdam the place to have fun, but this October it’s also the place to be for Rubyist and Railers!

  Jonathan Weiss from Berlin, Germany will give a talk about Rails Security and Stijn Mathijsen from Essen, Belgium will give a talk about JQuery on Rails. More info in the speakers section!

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• Nieuwe sprekers!

  Posted on 16 September 2009

  Er zijn weer nieuwe sprekers bekend. Eloy Duran komt ons uitleggen waarom we allemaal MacRuby moeten gaan gebruiken. Wanneer je nu eindelijk wel eens wil zien hoe je in de praktijk Rails testing gebruik is Edwin Vlieg zijn presentatie zeker een aanrader. Bart ten Brinke en zijn collega onderzoeken voor je hoe je je Ruby app up-to-speed kan houden.
  
  
  
  
  More coming up!

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• RubyEnRails 2009, meld je alvast aan!

  Posted on 10 September 2009

  Ook dit jaar weer een RubyEnRails conferentie met Geek-dag! Het zal plaatsvinden op 30 en 31 oktober, wederom in Amsterdam! De sprekers line-up vult al aardig, onder andere Jeremy Kemper en Yehuda Katz komen hun verhaal vertellen de 30ste!

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