cookies and code

Peter Armstrong, author of Flexible Rails, gave this presentation which focussed on how Flex and AIR can consume REST’ful resources. Peter unfortunately had a hard drive crash about an hour before his presentation so needless to say his presentation didn’t go as planned. Although he didn’t really have any slides (because they were all destroyed) he was able to borrow the laptop of a fellow conference go’er and show us some code examples.

The code examples were geared towards introducing MXML and Actionscript to Rails developers. I feel pretty comfortable with both, but it’s always good to see different approaches to coding in Flex, especially code using HTTPService since I spend more time using RemoteObjects. I would have liked to seen, if only mentioned, the topic of component development (visual and non-visual) and data binding, but I can understand why it was omitted since most Rails developers aren’t familiar with UI practices other than your standard web stack.

Towards the end of the presentation, Peter revealed Ruboss, a Flex framework built specifically for consuming REST’ful resources. Ruboss uses a controller to expose an Actionscript interface to translate CRUD operations to their REST’ful equivalents. He said he’s going to be releasing it over the next few weeks under his new company, so watch Ruboss.com for more details.

We’ve asked Peter to give a Connect presentation at an Adogo meeting later this year on Flex/AIR and Rails. The Orlando community can definitely benefit from Peter’s work with Flex/REST and we hope to pimp that to its fullest … j/k Peter, keep up the great work.

Luke Francl, from SlantWise Design, gave the 2nd presentation of the day on Best Practices for Rails Teams. He went into common problems that any Rails shop with 3 or 4+ developers have to address. I didn’t get much out of the presentation since I’ve spent the majority of my career trying to solve these issues, but a lot of people were attentive and the Rails twists did peek my interest; migration conflict resolution was very interesting. Luke did a great job referring to some classical and popular texts for project management and had even had a detailed hand out, so he was definitely prepared.

It’s always good to see people pushing good SCM and PM practices in a community. Keep up the great work Luke.

Yesterday morning I skipped the charity session, not because I hate charity, but in favor of getting some work done at the office before the conference. For me the first session was Neal Ford’s presentation on Advanced DSL’s in Ruby. Neal works for ThoughtWorks where they have being using Ruby to build internal DSL’s for customers with some success. He focussed his presentation around a Bakery example, but more importantly, while doing so was able to convey a set of patterns that they’ve found useful while building DSL’s (mainly internal DSL’s).

• Went over good uses for method chaining and nested method as they apply to creating/maintaining an object’s state (Good Citizen pattern).
• Spoke about benefits of using method/property aliases as a cheap way to provide clarity (e.g. – gram() and grams() do the same thing)
• Detailed the Type Transmogrification pattern and the Constant Missing Factory pattern and the benefits of using “open” classes (e.g. – missingMethod and missingProperty methods) to avoid cluttered implementation classes that provide flexible interfaces.
• Talked about using context to reduce code noise within the DSL itself.
• Went into the Bubble Word pattern which provides “empty” semantics allowing the DSL to be more expressive but helping to simplify the DSL’s implementation.

Neal also spoke about external DSL’s a bit getting into an Expression Builder pattern which gives a good context for good practices as far as parsing DSL strings go. One thing that was reassuring to hear was the discouragement of complicating DSL strings with the intention of using regex to reduce complexity. I’m regex stupid, so whenever someone tells me they’ve been successful by taking simpler approaches, I’m always happy.

This by far was the best presentation of the day, IMO. Recently I’ve been working on a mock object library for ColdFusion and a lot of the topics Neal mentioned in his talk resonate with me as a good basis for solidifying my ideas for the library. ColdFusion lacks the majority of the great meta-programming features that a Ruby or Groovy would have, but I’ve some ideas up my sleeve. Great work Neal! I really enjoyed the talk.

I finally brought myself to attend a Ruby/Rails conference. I was motivated to do so by my most recent venture into JRuby and Rails at the office. acts_as_conference 2008 is put on by RailsForAll, an active participant in the Orlando Ruby community, as a single track, 2-day event being held out by Universal Studios. I just listened to an interview of Neal Ford on aboutGroovy.com and really enjoyed it. As luck would have it, I just found out that he is speaking at this conference. I’m really interested to see what constitutes advanced topics for Ruby DSLs (hopefully some patterns), especially with my latest venture into a library for using mock objects within ColdFusion (more on this later). Since I’m using JRuby, I expect the highlight of this conference for me to be the Headius. In reading his blog it sounds like we’ll get to see some of the really cool stuff that makes JRuby tick. Dan Benjamin and Obie Fernandez will be closing out each day, respectively, with a keynote that should be interesting since they seem to be recognized Ruby/Rails community members.

I’m enjoying what I’ve done thus far with JRuby/Rails and am grateful to the community for putting this even on in the Orlando area. Continuing with habits from previous conferences, I’ll try to post a summary of each session I attend as well as my pretty useless commentary. Here’s to being misunderstood and taken out of context by an entirely new community.

Well I didn’t know what to expect from participating in a belated conference via audio files, but I set my expectations low because the conference was intended for a general audience. A lot of the sessions covered material I was familiar with but it was cool to get a different perspective and see what the lecturers were pushing in the community. Overall I think it would have been a good conference to go to. I got some cool ideas for ColdBox that hopefully Luis and I can hash out. If they offer it via audio again next year I’ll definitely download it

Elliott Sprehn from Teratech gave this session. He spoke about the use of metadata on objects and their relationships to infer information for use in things like design pattern implementations. He went over how sometimes configuration in frameworks causes a duplication of knowledge because the frameworks needs things spelled out in a specific XML grammar to work correctly. On the conceptual level, he did a descent, not great, but decent job of defending convention or configuration. There were a lot of the framework creators in the audience who disagreed with him, so that was a comfortable listen.

He spoke about some of the great tools that ColdFusion had which made convention-based frameworks very easy to build (e.g. – Named parameters in method calls aiding in writing routes for SES URL support). He went into the GetMetaData() function as well just to show what features ColdFusion offered in terms of introspection. Towards the end of the session he tried to show some examples, and nothing worked. He even came with a few excuses for it, which was again awkward. The session had the potential to be really good, but Elliott wasn’t prepared and it weakened his argument.

I was however able to get some ideas for ColdBox from his session. I would like to see the session again, just with a little more preparation.

Rob Gonda gave this session. He went into a basic overview of OO constructs (e.g. – class, object, method, etc.). He then went into the concept of the Factory pattern. The explainations between the IoC and Dependency Injection patterns were interchanged a few times, but Rob was able to get the basic idea across. He explained how to use ColdSpring and the problems it helped to solve in terms of object construction. As he walked through each concept he used Ray Camden’s Galleon app to show how object factories could be used to simplify the construction process based on the solution.

It’s funny to hear all of the variations with respect to what people call the classes they work with. Rob in an aside mentioned the classifications he likes to give classes:

• Service classes
• Transient classes
• Persistence classes being Transfer and ActiveRecord classes
• Business classes (I think I remember him saying this one, but this may be interchangable with Transient classes)

Just another variation of how to communicate your ideas about OO programming I guess.

I was pleasently surprised with the quality of the content as compared to the rest of the sessions. Great job Rob; nice meeting you at cf.objective()!

This talk was given by Hal Helms. Unfortunately, for the people attending the conference, Hal had his laptop confiscated by the Canadian border patrol on a trip in January. He gave a short talk about civil liberties and then went into his impressions about the current state of the programming job market and his impression of the “threat” of outsourcing. He advocated programming smarter (i.e. – education in software engineering) but acknowledged that this wasn’t necessarily something which could guarantee an American edge in the battle for the job market. Hal advocated the idea of getting better via the process of architecting and managing projects from a technological perspective using Interface Driven Architectures (IDAs). This is basically the idea of fortifying some form of prototype and locking down the UI to avoid feature creep later in the development process. Hal indirectly encouraged a huge of time spent on domain modeling which was encouraging to hear.

Overall, it was good to hear any perspective on the state of our industry but the session was a little light on content.

John Paul Ashenfelter also gave this session. He gave a very comprehensive overview of the Ruby on Rails framework and the tools it provides to solve a multitude of common problems faced by web application developers. The context of the session was definitely to draw a comparison between ColdFusion/Fusebox/etc and RoR. No negative connotation went along with the comparison, but you could definitely tell he’s a big Rails fan.

John had some very valid points, but I got the same vibe I do from most of the community experts when they present regarding the type of work they do. In my current job we are attempting to build software that is going to last for at least a decade, or so we hope. We’re making decisions which are not only helping to shape the software we build, but decisions to better understand the business domain we’re working within. I am really curious if most of these consultants have similar concerns? I’m sure they follow best practices and are good at their jobs, but what type of longevity and scale do consultants have in mind? Is the time necessary to build things like canonical data models and SOA’s only available to the salaried guys/gals? It seems like consulting is very project/task-based which I associated with very short term goals. I don’t know, I’m probably off my rocker.

Anyway, good talk John, thanks for mentioning JRuby too!

John Paul Ashenfelter gave this session. This session turned out the same way it has in the past 2 years, a good overview of what’s available in terms of free testing tools. He advocated the use of cfcUnit for unit testing and Selenium for integration testing. John always does a great job speaking and the session was informative.