Attended a great talk by Michael Bleigh on Twitter on Rails. He has built a gem, TwitterAuth, that uses Twitter as authentication provider (OAuth or HTTP Basic) which allows to to quickly and easily create Twitter applications in Rails. In Michael’s words “TwitterAuth makes Twitter Rails apps stupid simple“.
The talk built Twistener – a Twitter application in Rails that shows how many tweepl are having a conversation about you. A hosted version of the application is available at twisteners.heroku.com. The slides and end result of the code are always helpful.
In a post-talk conversation he mentioned that all the gems are pure Ruby. Any body willing to re-build the application and trying using JRuby and GlassFish ?
And then attended Rails 3: Stepping off of the Golden Path by a “morally loose, cheese eating surrender monkey”, aka Matt Aimonetti 
What are you going to get in Rails 3 ?
- Improved performance
- Increased modularity
- Agnosticism (choose any JS framework)
- Public API
- Mountable Apps
Rails 3: ORM => ActiveRecord, JavaScript => Prototype, Templating => ERB, Testing => Test::Unit. The defaults are exactly same as Rails 2.x.x and the idea is to provide the least amount of changes from user perspective, yet provide a choice.
Some other key points highlighted in the talk were:
- More flexible, Less opinionated
- Templating engines: HAML and ERB are the big ones.
- ORM: ActiveRecord, DataMapper
- Adapaters: RDBMS, File Ssytem, IMAP, YAML, REST APIs, Custom APIs
- Sequel: Prepared statement, Sharding, highly customization SQL
- Use Hibernate with either ActionORM, JRuby
- Ability to talk to Non RDBMS Systems; GAE, CouchDB, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, etc
Had a so-so lunch buffet at a local Indian restaurant with a limited variety and average food. It was hot in Vegas today (98 degrees high and 72 degrees low) and we walked to the restaurant. An Indian buffet and a long walk in the high temperatures is a perfect recipe for a sleepy afternoon 
But it was apparently contagious cause the person sitting next to me dozed off while I kept awake!
Anyway here are some pictures captured earlier today:
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And then the complete album:
See ya next year!
Technorati: conf railsconf lasvegas rubyonrails
