Some thoughts and comments on the goings-on at Pragmatic Studio’s Rails Edge conference last week:

• There seemed to be a general sense among all the speakers that Rails is starting to mature — at least in the sense that nobody expects best practice style to keep changing every three months. There were a lot of semi-ironic asides from the speakers along the lines of “remember how we used to code this, like a year ago”, but the clear intent seems to be to tone down the waves, so to speak.

• There’s now a deployment story that everybody can get behind, as Mongrel clustering has gotten to the point where it can be easily set up as part of a powerful deployment stack. There do seem to be more improvements down the line, but Rails has finally gotten gotten to the point where a mere mortal with basic network admin skills can put something together that can run a decent-sized site.

• A lot of the speaker focus was on automated testing and coverage, which is great. Several of the speakers were explicit about taking the “if it’s not tested, it’s broken” line.

• If I had to guess, I’d say the next focus of improving Rails structure will be the view section. A lot of grumbling about ERB and how hard it is to test. There were a couple of suggestions for improvements, but this seems to be one area where nothing has coalesced yet.

• Rails core programmer Marcel Molina gave an interesting talk about factoring helper methods into smarter objects, but even he admitted he wasn’t quite sure what the best way to integrate the mechanism into Rails. Personally, I’d love to see a much more OO based than template based mechanism for views. Chad Fowler said that he thinks the best view system out there is in the Smalltalk Seaside framework.

• The single biggest “ooh, aah” moment from the crowd was when Dave Thomas pointed out that Rails evaluates (now..them).to_s(:db) as BETWEEN '2007-08-30 11:21:12' AND '2007-08-03 12:13:12'. Maybe you had to be there…

• I’m not sure to what extent this is meaningful, but the MacBook to all other laptop ratio was at least 4:1. Every single speaker used a MacBook, all but one used Keynote (one speaker had his talk on PDF), and all but one used TextMate (one speaker used Emacs).

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