First Impressions

The first Rails conference in London, attracted about 400 people. Given the number of people you'd think that name tags would be used. Unfortunately, the name tags were printed with the names being the smallest and most unreadable text at the bottom of the tag.

Some people had lanyards, others clipped these useless plastic rectangles somewhere on their person, some had acquired bits of string. Not what I expected from a £500 a head conference.

DHH Keynote

The conference kicked off with DHH talking about Rails 1.2. He intends for this to be the last major 1.x release before 2.0

Main changes include:

• dependency system
• auto reloading, support in models, and controllers, of modules
• routing
• removal of deprecated features: in development this will generate warnings, and simply not work in production

SimplyRestful intends to use HTTP to indicate what to do. What appears to be have been taken up by many others was the respond_to

respond_to do |format| format.html # render :action => 'index.rhtml' format.xml { render :xml => @posts.to_xml}
format.js # render :action => 'index.rjs' end

One question I had was what is to stop me messing with other people's model using SimplyRestful. Jim Weirich asked a similar question at the end of the day. Apparently there would be authentication.

SimplyHelpful is another plugin, this time aimed at views. Basically it allows you to write your views more like you might expect: dealing with models.

DHH then showed a picture of a flower, and the talk ended. His keynote continued in the evening. Perhaps it was good that this happened, as he was very caustic.

The Rant

The second half of his talk was basically a rant. He was not happy about the reaction of a vocal few when there was a security issue raised, and the mailing list was moved without warning.

He felt that he owes the average Joe very little. They downloaded the software and then demand that it works. He showed and read out the license which ships with Rails. His conclusion: I don't owe you shit.

He then proceeded to clarify that he aimed that statement at people who have not contributed anything to the community. They have no currency with him.

I am not sure he understands that the problem was not the security problem, or the mailing list move. The problem was the way it was communicated to the community. Why were people expecting a more open explanation of the security problem, and notification of a mailing list move? Using DHH's words - it's convention.

It is convention to explain what security hole you have just patched. It is convention to warn the mailing list before you move it. That is why people reacted the way they did. They were treated without respect, and it is now clear why: DHH is leading by example.

He noted Kathy Sierra's talk mentioned "be nice" as the key to her forums working so well. I wonder if he ignored the rest of her talk.

More about the first day of the conference tomorrow, as it is now midnight.