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.