Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Follow Rails Conf Europe 2008

Would you like to follow the latest on Rails Conf Europe 2008 ? Here are some sources:

IRC: #railsconfeurope
Twitter: RailsConfEurope and RailsConfEU and railsconf
Facebook: RailsConf Europe
Flickr: railsconfeurope08
RSS: OreillyConferencesRailsconfEurope
News and Coverage
Dopplr: eurorailsconf08

And of course, official website!

Technorati: conf railsconf berlin rubyonrails

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Rails Conf Europe 2008 and Bratwurst-on-Rails

I arrived Berlin yesterday on a non-adventurous United flight from San Francisco, just the way I like it! The flight from Frankfurt was delayed 30 minutes but that's normal these days :)

The venue of RailsConf Europe 2008 is same as last year so street names/geography are somewhat familiar. But the conference hotel was sold out so am instead staying across the street. Visited Brandenburger Tor for a short duration after checking into the hotel. Also stopped by the Peugeot showroom on Unter den Linden and saw popular bear figurines in a side street. The evening ended with a social gathering celebrating the popular German culture of Bratwurst-on-Rails.

It's always exciting to meet my blog readers, thank you! Let me know if I'm missing any of your expectations.

The tutorial starts today and the conference starts tomorrow. If you are in Berlin, don't forget to attend the joint JUG and TU-Berlin talk. And my talk on "Rails powered by GlassFish" is scheduled on Thursday, Sep 4 @ 1:40pm.

The evening really eneded with a 40 minutes run and dinner in room service. The Jolly Hotel is really nice, newer rooms, courteous staff, delicious and very neatly prepared Club Chicken sandwich and prompt room service, definitely a good recommendation. However the fitness center is minimal with one ultra-loud treadmill and 3 other basic machines. The hotel staff informed that they are working on furnishing the fitness center (known as Wellness Center here). And there is only one American channel which is only talking about Storm Gustav and Republican National Convetion, Juno of Juneau since my arrival  :(

Anyway, enjoy the pictures so far!

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FREE Ticket to Rails Conf Europe 2008

Are you a Start up company interested in jump starting and meets the following criteria ?

In business six years or less A maximum of 150 employees, including any affiliates Based in a country in which the program is offered A verifiable company presence (website, company profile, etc.) Agree to accept the program's terms and conditions

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Interested in a 30 second promotion in Rails Conf Europe 2008 ?

Are you deploying Rails application on GlassFish  in any manner (WAR-based, Gem or Technology Preview 2) ? Are you using Rails and GlassFish combination in a creative way ? Having you been following Rails/GlassFish development/deployment options and have an opinion ?

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GlassFish @ Berlin-Brandenburg JUG and TU Berlin

I'll be providing an overview of GlassFish - engineering update on v2 and v3, adoption & success stories, and the vibrant community around it at a joint Berlin-Brandenburg JUG and TU-Berlin meet on Sep 3, 2008.

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GlassFish @ Rails Conf Europe 2008

Sun Microsystems is a diamond sponsor of Rails Conf Europe 2008 and we'll be there!

Here is the list of Sun sessions:

• Tuesday, 9/2/2008
• Take the JRuby Challenge: Deploy Your Rails Application with JRuby and Taste the Difference, 13:30, Saul Maritim A
• Wednesday, 9/3/2008
• JRuby: The Other Red Meat, 10:45 - 11:30, Saal 2
• Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails, 13:40 - 14:25, Saal 2
• Meet the Sun You Don't Know, 16:45, Saul Maritim ABC
• Thursday, 9/4/2008
• Developing Ruby and Rails Applications with the NetBeans IDE, 10:45 - 11:30, Saul Maritim C
• Rails powered by GlassFish, 13:40 - 14:25, Saul Maritim B

• Rails Conf Europe Home
• Schedule (create-your-personal)
• Promotion Banners/Buttons
• Bratwurst-on-Rails (Pre-conference socializing)
• Rails Conf Blog

• JRuby in GlassFish
• NetBeans Ruby Support

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GlassFish and jMaki @ RailsConf Today

I was originally planning to give my first talk at Rails Conf on "Rails powered by GlassFish and jMaki". But I cannot travel for personal reasons and instead Craig McClanahan, who is an excellent speaker, has graciously agreed to speak. Craig has been involved with Rails, GlassFish and jMaki for a long time so feel free to poke hime at the talk, in the exhibit hall and afterwards.

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Rails Conf Europe 2007 - Day 3

Day 3 started with reminders about RubyConf 2007 and upcoming Euruko. Marcel and Koz (from Rails core team) gave the keynote talking about the best practices for Rails (theRailsWay.com). Here are some of the tips they explained:

• If a controller has more than 6 or 7 actions, and each action > 6-7 lines then there is something wrong. More details here.
• Associations proxies are very handy, more details here.
• Use named callbacks to improve maintainability and readability of the code. This also help improve clarity of thoughts. The value of expressive interfaces is important as the size of applications grow bigger. More details here.
• Use with_scope to subset a model's collection - More details here.

The Sun booth was swamped today as well, just like yesterday. There were some great interactions and I do plan to follow up on them.

I missed the "Meet the JRuby team" BoF yesterday night. But I was very excited to know that Ola Bini made a statement in the bof that amongst all the free and fee-based Application Servers, GlassFish is the best. GlassFish V2 was released earlier this week and read all about it's capabilities here.

Craig and Nick's talk on Rails Hydra was SRO with even all the floor space occupied and was attended by DHH. Brian mesmerized the audience with NetBeans Ruby magic in his talk. There were lots of users who came by the booth afterwards and were very happy with the NetBeans Ruby support. All the presentations will be available here.

Andrea won the SunFire T-1000 Server, Congratulations! And Sharat gave out 5 copies of RESTful Web services books as well.

And the food of course was quite a blast, the desserts were completely outstanding!

We'll see you at another conference now.

Here are some useful entries (with numerous pointers on screencasts, blogs, tips & extensive feature sets) to get you started with JRuby on Rails, NetBeans IDE, GlassFish and jMaki:

• JRuby in GlassFish
• NetBeans Ruby Support
• Ruby Tutorials and Demos
• jMaki on Rails - 2nd edition

Technorati: conf railsconf railsconfeurope glassfish netbeans jmaki rubyonrails

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I shoot you, You shoot me

The other half of the picture below is here.

The pictures were taken during a beer bust hosted by Joyent during Rails Conf Europe 2007 at Lindenbrau Brewery in Berlin, Germany.

Any guess who's the guy behind the camera ?

Technorati: railsconf railsconfeurope photos lindenbrau shootme

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Rails Conf Europe 2007 - Day 2

Day 2 started with regular announcements and keynote by DHH. The demographic distribution of approximately 750 attendees was shown in the filler slides right before the keynote:

The technical sessions and BoFs started today and the exhibit hall was opened as well. Sun booth was swamped and we showed "NetBeans Tooling for Ruby on Rails", "Rails and Software as a Service" and "Rails powered by jMaki and GlassFish".

The demo showed at "Rails powered by jMaki and GlassFish" is available here. And here are some other pointers mentioned in the booth:

• What is jMaki ?
• jMaki NetBeans plugin

GlassFish is an open-source, production-quality and Java EE 5 compatible Application Server. Here are some of the key benefits of GlassFish for Rails developers:

• GlassFish allows existing Java EE applications and RoR apps in one container.
• GlassFish provides high availability and clustering support integrated in the app server.
• GlassFish provides database connection pooling that allows to reuse database connections.
• Applications can be re-deployed on GlassFish without any need to re-start the server.
• The development and deployment environment is exactly the same.

There are few others and they will be consolidated in an article later.

Both of Sun's talks today were well attended:

The lunch was quite a treat:

Here are some useful entries (with numerous pointers on screencasts, blogs, tips & extensive feature sets) to get you started with JRuby on Rails, NetBeans IDE, GlassFish and jMaki:

• JRuby in GlassFish
• NetBeans Ruby Support
• Ruby Tutorials and Demos
• jMaki on Rails - 2nd edition

Use the tag "railsconfeurope" to ensure your blog/photos are aggregated appropriately.

Technorati: conf railsconf railsconfeurope glassfish netbeans jmaki rubyonrails

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Rails Conf Europe 2007 - Day 1

Arrived in Berlin 2 days ago for Rails Conf Europe. Sun Microsystems is a diamond sponsor and you can meet me at the "Rails powered by jMaki and GlassFish" booth in the Exhibit Hall. You can read about overall Sun's presence here.

I realized in the morning that my Full Conference pass did not account for any of the tutorials. And all of them were completely sold out with approx 750 attendees flooding all the rooms. So there was no chance to even sneak in :( I decided to spend the time taking the city tour and visiting other places. Here are some tips for travelers to Europe (Berlin in particular):

1. Before you start on the trip, it's a good idea to inform your Credit Card company and ATM provider about your upcoming trip. This will ensure that they do not unnecessarily block your card suspecting a fraudulent usage.
2. The taxi driver was very excited knowing that we came from California. The reason for his excitement was Arnold Schwarzenegger - that a former European national became "Mr Masculine", then a movie super star and now the Governor of California :) I'll probably carry a cutting of Arnold from a local newspaper in my next visit.
3. So far in my 2-days experience, European shopkeepers prefer (read "accept only") cash as opposed to the US where credit card is accepted everywhere, even in Kinko's for a one-pager :) So make sure to carry sufficient cash with you. Nobody has agreed to accept the credit card so far (Taxi Driver, City Tour, Grocery and even good restaurants).
4. Some ATM machines in the US can accommodate a pin number greater than 4 digit numbers. ATM machines in Europe cannot handle that and my banker specifically confirmed that with me. It's recommended to reduce your pin number to 4 digits.
5. How to convert $$ to Euros ? There are multiple ways but the best bet is to use the ATM machine at the airport. They provide a good conversion rate, most reliable and easily accessible. Check with your ATM card provider if they charge any fees for the international usage. For example, Wells Fargo charges $5 flat fee for international usage of their ATM card. Bank of America is a good alternative as it does not charge any transaction fees if you use any Deutsche Bank machine (which is prevalent) and of course BoA by itself is a much bigger network.
6. Bathrooms/Restrooms are called as "Water Closet", typically marked with "WC", and that was a new learning for me right at the airport.
7. The Berlin City runs "Berlin City Tour" hop-on-hop-off buses starting at 10:30am at an interval of 30 minutes and the last leaving at 4pm. In an approx 2 hour tour (without any hop off) they cover 11 touristy spots in the city. The weather was beautiful and we enjoyed the ride as the first thing in Berlin. The guide particularly made it interesting by sharing stories around the spots.
8. The communication with locals is bit of an issue. Most of the people in public dealing can understand English somewhat but the likelihood of asking somebody on the roadside for directions and not able to communicate is very high. Be prepared to ask more than once and it'll work.
9. Everybody in this city (Berlin) seems to smoke - quite a few actively and rest of them passively. Public smoking is quite prevalent and that was quite a change from back home.
10. I did not find any water fountains in public places, not even outside the bathrooms. So carry your own water bottle.

And here is Berlin in pictures

Thanks to Joyent for hosting the beer bust. That's all for today! See you tomorrow at the booth :)

All my travel tips to Europe are aggregated here.

Technorati: conf railsconf railsconfeurope glassfish netbeans jmaki traveltips europe

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jMaki, NetBeans and GlassFish in Rails Conf Europe 2007

Sun Microsystems is a Diamond Sponsor of Rails Conf Europe 2007 (Sep 17 - 19). We'll demonstrate how NetBeans 6 IDE provides a complete development environment for Rails application GlassFish provides a robust and modular deployment platform jMaki provides a complete framework for creating RIAs

Here is list of sessions from Sun speakers:

Other than this, you can always find us in the exhibitor pavilion.

Joyent, one of our partners, will be sharing the booth space and showcasing their Ruby on Rails powerful and scalable development and deployment systems. Here are their sessions:

Here are some useful entries (with numerous pointers on screencasts, blogs, tips & extensive feature sets) to get you started with JRuby on Rails, NetBeans IDE, GlassFish and jMaki:

• JRuby in GlassFish
• NetBeans Ruby Support
• Ruby Tutorials and Demos
• jMaki on Rails

See you there!

Technorati: conf railsconf railsconfeurope glassfish netbeans jmaki

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Rails creator on JRuby, Rails and Sun

In a recent interview, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Rails) talks about the upcoming Rails Conf Europe, future of Rails, JRuby and other things. Here are some quotes ...

On JRuby and Rails

JRuby is a great way to open the conversation with enterprises by saying, You don't have to throw out all this "junk" you've accumulated over the years, Ruby is just an incremental piece you can put in. But in some ways, it's sugar coating to get people to really come on board. It's a bridge for getting from one place to another.

On Sun's relationship with Rails

I think they recognize what developers want, they are recognizing there is great enthusiasm and passion for Ruby on Rails, and they don't want to miss out on that. To a large extent, they are following the passion, the excitement.

I know some people inside of Sun know what's going on, but whether they as a company choose to accept the lessons I don't know. In some ways, Rails is a rebellion against J2EE, but at the same time, they're doing great work with JRuby and Unix level tools like DTrace. Like any big company it's going to have different factions inside. I welcome Sun and IBM to come in and offer services.

Here are some useful entries (with numerous pointers on screencasts, blogs, tips & extensive feature sets) to get you started

• JRuby in GlassFish
• NetBeans Ruby Support
• Ruby Tutorials and Demos

And a very recent entry at:

JRuby/Rails on Glassfish Actually Works!

Technorati: jruby rubyonrails railsconf glassfish netbeans ruby

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Tim Bray's keynote session at Rails Conf

Tim Bray, Web Guy from Sun Microsystems gave the keynote session at Rails Conf 2007 yesterday (May 19). With 1600 attendees, it was quite a different experience from JavaOne last week which had approx 16,000 people. The session was to start @ 9am and we were made to wait until 8:55am outside the Ballroom.

Anyway, once the session started it was packed!

• How many people work for startups ? - Approx 40%
• How many work for non-startups, like Sun ? - Approx 40%
• How many for service providers, like ThoughtWorks - Approx 20%
• How many are using Ruby as the first programming language - Approx 5%
• How many came to Ruby from:
  • Java - Approx 70%
  • Microsoft - Approx 40%
  • PHP - Approx 40%

He also announced Sun will donate servers to open-source Ruby projects. Showed screen shots of Mephisto source code in NetBeans 6 and RHTML debugging.

Tim invited Charles Nutter, JRuby core developer on the stage and asked "Why JRuby ?".

Charles: JRuby is a new different way of looking at Ruby. Because it runs on Java, it scales very well, tested thoroughly, allows Ruby to get into enterprises where Ruby and/or Rails have never entered and there is a vast amount of Java libraries accessible to Ruby developers.

Tim: Any gotchas ?
Charles: If not feeling the pain under Ruby, keep doing it. JRuby is not a solution to all problems. If you want to scale better or differently, then this may be your solution. This gets you into enterprises where there is no Ruby or Rails presence.

Tim: When will JRuby be released ?
Charles: JRuby RC is out and FCS will be released by month-end.

Charles also said to give JRuby tee-shirts (pretty cool looking and has Duke holding a Ruby gem) if you contribute to the project or submit patches. Here are some pictures of Tim:

One of the big questions that we were getting asked at the Sun pod was "What is Sun doing at Rails Conf ?". Tim answered that very clearly in his session:

Sun sells Computers, Infrastructures, Operating Systems (Solaris) which is driving biggest, hairiest, ugliest and yet highly-performant systems in the world. We have x4500 Thumper, M9000, Identity Management Solutions. And then we are a systems company so we have NetBeans - a highly productive Rails development environment, jMaki - rich set of widgets for Rails view, and GlassFish - deployment of Rails applications.

Another couple of interesting topics that Tim touched on is:

• How to make money on free products ?
  • Adoption - Aligns with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) says "mindshare gets market share". Adoption is all about friction and the biggest is payment friction. Being open source allows you to get rid of that.
  • Deployment - After adoption, you see deployment.
  • Monetization at the point of value - The hypothesis is "No serious business will deploy any serious application on any serious solution unless it is supported."
• Even if Rails is successful beyond our wildest dreams, Java, .NET and PHP will never go away. The solution is to deal with them and integrate them using REST. Here are some strong positives about Java - the platform, the language, a set of APIs, the community:
  • Highly concurrent with multiple threads in the JVM. This allows your application to scale much better.
  • Security in the JVM - Sandbox security allows to build robust internet-based applications
  • Universe of Java APIs is better than C, PHP and all other languages.
  • 6 million community of Java developers

I had to leave the session early because of setting up the booth but it was a great talk!

Check out the flickr stream for the show.

Technorati: railsconf sun jruby glassfish netbeans jmaki

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Sun @ Rails Conf 2007 - Keep coming!

Sun is a diamond sponsor of Rails Conference 2007. At the booth we are showing how jMaki provides a rich set of widgets for Rails application. Also talk to us about how GlassFish V2 can provide a deployment environment for WAR-ed up RoR apps and how GlassFish V3 provides deployment of original packaging of RoR apps.

We are also showing the best platform for hosting Ruby on Rails -- Sun Fire T2000, Sun Startup Essentials, NetBeans 6 great Ruby and Rails capabilities. And our booth is shared with Joyent. And then of course, we are giving a few sessions

We are loving the response so far, keep it coming!

 

Thanks to Lou for the pictures.

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