James Cox

James Cox has been developing and interacting with the web for the last six years, building apps small and big. Having worked on projects as diverse as editorially driven content management through e-commerce, he has a wide range of scenarios to draw from.

Having not only developed small projects, James has experience managing high scalability situations too. Starting with PHP's website, php.net, he spent many years managing the various services within the infrastructure team, learning the tricks of the trade and experimenting with new techniques.

Since, then James has solved the scalability and uptime issues of a major Mid-East online news source, and is currently working with a massively popular webzine serving over 10 million hits a day.

Within the community James has worked on testing new availability scenarios with other leading scalability evangelists and continues to research new ways to attain high performance webapps.

Presentation: "Rails 2.0: what's new?"

Track: The Rise of Ruby

Time: Friday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Franciscan II

Abstract:

Rails 2.0 is almost ready to be released. With it comes maturity and new features.

This session talks through the 2.0 changes - Resources, shortcuts, http authentication, security, exception handling and multiviews in Action Pack; sexy migrations, performance and other ActiveRecord updates just to name a few.

We'll also try to figure out if Rails is mature yet. I'll also propose a potential future for Rails, exploring who's using it, why they've chosen it, ending in the next steps for the framework.

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.