Obie Fernandez, Rails Developer's Guide

Obie Fernandez is a recognized tech industry leader and independent consultant, specializing in the marketing and development of large-scale, web-based applications.

He is based out of Atlanta, Georgia and has two children: Taylor Anne, 10 and Liam, 8 years old. Obie is an accomplished blogger and author. He is Series Editor of the Professional Ruby Series for prestigious tech publishing house Addison-Wesley.

His own book for the series is titled The Rails Way. Obie also manages the Ruby content and a team of volunteer reporters as editor of the popular technology portal InfoQ.com, with over 135,000 unique visitors in May 2007.

Presentation: "Introduction: The Rise of Ruby"

Track: The Rise of Ruby

Time: Friday 09:00 - 09:15

Location: Franciscan II

Presentation: "Designing RESTful Rails Applications"

Track: The Rise of Ruby

Time: Friday 14:30 - 15:30

Location: Franciscan II

Abstract:

The REST support in Rails consists of helper methods and enhancements to the routing system, designed to impose a particular style and order and logic on your controllers and, consequently, on the way the world sees your application.

The benefits of leveraging Rails' REST support fall into two categories: * convenience and automatic best practices for you * a REST interface to your applications's services, for everyone else.

You can reap the first benefit even if you're not concerned with the second. In fact, that's going to be our focus: what the REST support in Rails can do for you in the realm of making your code nicer and your life as a Rails developer easier.

Moreover, the relationship between Rails and REST, while a fruitful one, is not free of difficulties. Much Rails practice is non-compliant with the precepts of REST from the beginning. REST involves stateless communication; every request has to contain everything necessary for the recipient to generate the correct response. But pretty much every non-trivial Rails program in the world uses server state to track sessions. To the extent that they do, they are not adhering to the REST design.

Untangling all the issues and dilemmas is beyond the scope of this talk. Our focus will be on showing you how Rails REST support works, and opening the door to further study and practice -- including the study of Fielding's dissertation and the theoretical tenets of REST.

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Presentation: "Panel: When is Rails an Appropriate Choice?"

Track: The Rise of Ruby

Time: Friday 16:00 - 17:00

Location: Franciscan II

Abstract:

Rails has taken the development world by storm, being compared to Java in the skills parade of recent job adverts. But is Rails the right choice?

This panel of experts will discuss the reasons for picking the framework over other platform options, exploring topics such as choosing the platform for prototyping, scalability and ease of management.

Join us to get involved with the QandA and decide for yourself if switching to Rails is the path for you.