November 10, 2009

RubyEnRails 2009 has been a great experience – the talks, geek dinners and conversations with other developers have all been very interesting. Amsterdam is definitely the right town to organise such an event :).

Indirectly inspired by what we’ve heard there, we’re already trying some new things in our work, like we have some Cucumber tests running on Selenium and beginning to implement use of Tokyo Cabinet in a production app.

For a recap on all talks, it’s best you check out the official conference blog. For reference here we’ll highlight some the published slides and links:

• Rails Security – Jonathan Weiss discussed vulnerabilities on the entire stack, some of which were previously unknown to us. Most of them are very easy to execute from the attacker’s side, though.

• MongoDB on Rails – Michael Dirolf’s general introduction to this document-oriented database.

• Lessons learned while building omroep.nl – Bart Zonneveld and Sjoerd Tieleman presented omroep.nl, a large site developed for the Dutch national TV network. They also shared their Cucumber Salad rake task which lets you run Cucumber tests on multiple CPUs and save time.

• DSLs for front-end Rails – Justin Halsall showed how you should always strive to make code beautiful and keep it DRY, by giving an example of using blocks to solve a problem of repetition in view files with a little help of block_helpers. He charmed the audience with his Halloween appearance and lots of hand-raising questions such as “who likes code that works”.

• Rubyists.eu was also presented – it aims to list and connect Ruby communities in Europe.

• Photos tagged as ‘rer2009’ on Flickr

Update: Justin and Javier gave us more links in the comments.