The final day of a great conference was full of Rails for me.

State of Rails

DHH gave an update of what happened since he presented Rails at RubyConf 2004. Most of us know about this already, especially since some of us are actually doing it for a living now.

Rails 1.0 is close, and DHH was going to release an RC this afternoon. He also spoke about new tools:

SwitchTower - this is already out and allows you to manage deployment of your application to multiple machines.

Gauge - monitor in real-time a distributed Rails application.

Conductor - tools to make development easier. The example DHH gave was to have a web interface with a CocoaMySQL-like interface for dealing with fixtures in Active Record. Naked Objects was mentioned in relation to making scaffolding more permanent.

DHH also spoke of creating an industry around Rails. Textdrive and Robot Co-op were cited as leading examples. Also talk of a RailsConf in future.

Rails: Serving the Long Tail in 1883 and 2005

Nathaniel Talbott gave a motivating talk about where most of us are in the industry. Chris Anderson's Long Tail featured prominently. Most of us are working in the Long Tail.

What this means is that our field is small on sales, but highly specialised. Our work comes from small companies, businesses, or individuals who want some web applications built for them. Using Rails we can produce these applications faster and for less money.

Nathaniel predicted that we will see some form of Rails for producing desktop applications.

I think that Rails may well be suited for such a situation now. Starting an application could easily just start up webrick, and kick off the default browser to hit it.

Continuous Integration with Damage Control

Aslak Hellesoy's presentation was sadly hindered by lack of preparation and just bad luck.

I believe the system he was attempting to demonstrate was actually quite useful. Damage Control will run an application fully within RAM. This allows safe testing of applications.

DC is capable of integrating with SVN and CVS repositories as well as tracking systems such as Jira and Trac. It follows the principles of CI and will feature any commits performed whilst it is running.