Day three of the conference was not as good as the first two. The presentation by Rails Envy was great. Greg knows what he’s doing, and Jason is always able to inject humor.
Rails Envy – A Year of Innovation
Gregg and Jason spent about an hour touching on various “cool” things that have come out this year, or just finally came to popularity this year. Below is a list of some of the things that I found interesting:
* Prawn – a PDF generator for Ruby
* roo – used to read spreadsheets (works with Excel, OpenOffice and Google docs)
* Shard – lets you partition databases based on schema
* merb – a Rails alternative
* Mack – a Rails alternative, specially suited for portal applications
* Webby – a Rails alternative, geared around static web content (brochure sites)
* Shoes – a way to make cross-platform Ruby applications
* Sinatra – a good choice for more “purely REST” applications
* Redmine – a very flexible PM tool
* Adhearsion – VOIP with Ruby
* make_resourceful (and resource_controller) – both remove duplication you often find inside Rails REST-style controllers
* Starling – provides lightweight messaging
* Thin and Ebb – faster web servers than mongrel, allow deferred requests
* Neverblock – allows for multi-threaded DB adapters
Gregg even did a few demos of particular ones. The one most impressive for me was Neverblock. Gregg demonstrated a series of queries that took 30 seconds to complete (because they were handled in a single thread, one at a time). With Neverblock the same set of queries took 3 seconds!!
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