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Steppin’ Out: Real America Edition »

Created at: 15.08.2011 20:49, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community events gogaruco JRubyConf madison ruby rocky mountain ruby WindyCityRails

Greetings, faithful Rubyists! It's August, and the conference scene is about to blow up--we're fresh from Washington D.C., where we were pleased to participate in JRubyConf 2011! There were many talented and engaged people at that conference, and presentations by the JRuby core team were nice bookends for a great roster of speakers. We'd like to thank the good people at EdgeCase for all their hard work, and give a special shout-out to Amazon Web Services, who sponsored the now-legendary whisky tasting.

Going forward, we've got some awesome events to cap off your summer, the first of which is Madison Ruby, starting on August 18. Experience the vibrant Madison Ruby community, and make sure to stop by for the "Killer After-Party" (details forthcoming--keep your eye on @madisonruby). Madison will feature talks by Engine Yard's Charles Nutter, as well as Chicks Who Rip alum Renee De Voursney and many more.

Next up August 31-September 2 is Rocky Mountain Ruby, which promises to merge great technical presentations with "outdoor experiences!" An epic party will ensue in the taproom of craft brewery Avery's. Purchase your tickets now, before they sell out, and enjoy the natural splendor of Boulder, Colorado.

It's always great to come home to San Francisco, and GoGaRuCo makes it twice as nice. This year's Golden Gate Ruby Conference will take place from September 16-17 at the Mission Bay Conference Center. Wes Beary will be speaking, alongside Corey Haines and Ron Evans.

Finally, be sure to check out WindyCityRails on September 17 in Chicago. This event will feature an excellent slew of speakers, lightning talks, and a Groupon Octagon and Obtiva Coding Dojo. On September 16 the day before the conference, Engine Yard and Obtiva will host a day long Introduction to Rails taught by Gregg Pollack, from Code School & Envy Labs. The tutorial will start with a live version of Rails for Zombies followed by a second Zombie Rails tutorial (which has not yet been published). It's only 85 bucks--you can register here.

If you do make it out to these events, keep your eyes peeled for Engine Yard folks! It's always our pleasure to hang out with you guys.

Introduce a friend to Rails »

Created at: 12.08.2011 02:05, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events training Engine Yard University rails for zombies ruby on rails training WindyCityRails

This post has one purpose. I want you to bring a friend to the Introduction to Ruby on Rails training day on September 16th in Chicago. Code School's Gregg Pollack, of Rails for Zombies fame, is leading this day-long session, and it promises to deliver. Heck, bring two friends. Make sure they're cute.

Enroll Here

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk more about your cute friend, and why he or she should join us.

In my role as director of training at Engine Yard, I have heard two phrases again and again. The first goes something like this:

"We need to hire Rails programmers, but they are hard to find, and expensive."

The second phrase is the other side of the coin:

"Rails is awesome! I have so many opportunities!"

In the short run this is good news for the Rails guru. The labor curves drawn by your freshman Economics professor illustrate the benefit. An intersection of a low point on the labor supply curve with a high point on the demand curve means a solid income for all of us.

In the long run, and assuming the pressure to deliver web applications remains constant, there are some different economic models to consider. Even without innovation in other languages, a decrease in productivity due to talent acquisition costs will lead to fewer Rails projects over time. Alternatively, an influx of new Ruby on Rails programmers will help meet current and future demand.

To put it simply, if we love Ruby on Rails, which we do, it is in our interest to recruit new blood. It will grow the community, keep things thriving, and give us more warm fuzzies than the GDP of all the OPEC nations combined.

By the way. Gregg's session is followed by the WindyCityRails conference the next day. Does this not have the makings of a serious road trip?

If Rails is your religion, get your PHP and Java followers, and start the pilgrimage to Chicago, a city of great food, awesome pubs, and home to more Nobel Prize laureate Economists than any other city in the world.

Note: If you're interested in attending or hosting an Intro to Rails course (and the Zombies) in your city, get in touch.

Additional Note: Thanks to Obtiva for providing the space for this awesome event!

Yet Another Note: Cover image of May I Bring a Friend was included with permission from Perfection Learning.

JRubyConf 2011 »

Created at: 15.07.2011 20:56, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community events Open Source jruby JRubyConf

It's 2011, and it's time again for JRubyConf! We've got a great show in store for you, with lots of excellent talks and a whole bunch of JRuby commiters, users, and presenters gathered together for three days of geekery August 3-5 in DC. Let's take a look back at JRuby and JRubyConf over the past year, walk through a few of the talks, and see why you should consider attending JRubyConf yourself! 2011: The Year We Made Contact We've come a long way since JRubyConf 2009. That year, JRubyConf was simply an "extra day" attached to RubyConf, in the same hotel and with many of the same attendees. It was a great success, but pretty low-key compared to JRubyConf 2010. In 2010, Joe O'Brien and the EdgeCase folks offered to merge JRubyConf with eRubyCon, the "enterprise" Ruby conference. It marked the first time JRubyConf was a real, live conference, and we managed to draw in 150+ attendees and a great bunch of speakers. JRuby has come a long way too. Since JRubyConf, we've released two major versions of JRuby: 1.5 and 1.6. Both versions represented a tremendous number of commits and bugfixes...the two combined add up to almost as much work as all prior versions of JRuby. All that work has meant JRuby's achieved an extremely high level of compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7 (we almost never get 1.8.7-related bugs anymore), and in 1.6 we even officially started supporting Ruby 1.9.2 features. Also in 1.6, we included experimental support for running C extensions...something we never believed we'd be able to do. The JRuby updates and yearly JRubyConf are joined by the JRuby book, "Using JRuby", available from Pragmatic Programmers. After two years of on-again, off-again work, we managed to finish the book early this year. The response has been excellent, with new and existing users alike telling us how much they've enjoyed reading it. All this adds up to a big 2011 for JRuby, and it feels like we're starting to get our stride in both the Ruby and Java worlds. Almost every Rubyist has at least tried JRuby, and it seems like every other Rubyist has something running on JRuby today, even if it's not their primary platform. For me, that means people find JRuby useful, either as "just another Ruby", or because it has a number of features above and beyond Ruby (like Java integration and novel deployment options). For you, maybe it's time to check out JRuby, buy the book and attend JRubyConf. A Whole New JRubyConf For 2011, we've made JRubyConf into its own event, not attached to or taking over any other conference. The show will be in Washington, D.C. August 3-5, at the beautiful Kellogg Conference Center Auditorium on the campus of Gallaudet University. The conference registration price has been slashed, thanks to support from Engine Yard and EdgeCase, to only $199! We'll have the requisite after-hours events, repeating our whisky tasting from last year's show and adding a few other fun activities. But the focus of the show is squarely on the excellent speakers and presentations you'll see. I'm looking forward to all of them, but here's a few talks I think Rubyists and Java-heads alike will find interesting, especially if you're new to JRuby. Adopting JRuby and Making It Work If you're not yet sold on JRuby, Marc Peabody might be able to convince you. He's presenting A JRuby Tale, the story of a nearly-complete JRuby project being deployed into a Java organization. You'll learn not just when to use JRuby, but also when JRuby might not be the best fit. We also have Jason Gilman presenting Building the MagicWebService. Jason works on a NASA project called ECHO, which had a large SOAP web service they wanted to expose through a RESTful interface. JRuby came to the rescue, providing access to high-performance Java libraries, wrapped with a little Ruby sugar and wired into the Ruby libraries you know and love. Along similar lines comes the JRuby at LinkedIn talk by Baq Haidri. LinkedIn is one of the premier JRuby users, with several of their key applications using JRuby for the web front-end. Baq will explain the reasons for using JRuby on the front-end compared to other JVM language options, and hopefully we'll see some of the awesome polyglot integration the LinkedIn folks are doing. Desktop Applications If you're a desktop application developer, you can't miss Dan Lucraft's talk on Cross Platform Desktop Apps with JRuby. Dan is the creator of the Redcar Editor, a Textmate clone written in Ruby and running on JRuby. Redcar uses the SWT GUI framework for its UI, but wraps it with Ruby code and combines it with a powerful plugin system for all of Redcar's functionality. The result is a beautiful, fast, powerful editor that works across platform and requires no compilation on any of them. It's a great example of how to write good Ruby and take advantage of what JRuby has to offer. Big Data Big internet means big data, and Jeremy Hinegardner will present the timely Big Data and JRuby. If you're going to process big data, you need a solid runtime that can manage memory well, a concurrent runtime that allows you to completely utilize your hardware, and the right tools and libraries. JRuby, running on the JVM, gives you easy access to all three. Jeremy will talk specifically about Hadoop and Hadoop-related projects and how you can use them from JRuby today. Sematic Web and JRuby If you're interested in the semantic web, Carin Meier will present Semantic Web and JRuby and show how to leverage the Jana semantic web framework from your Ruby applications. I know at least one JRuby committer who's always had a think for the semantic web. Maybe you do too? Web Deployment Once you've got your JRuby application written, you're going to need to deploy it. To answer that need, we have David Calavera presenting Trinidad is Still My Name and Ben Browning presenting Why I Love Torquebox (And Why You Should Too. Trinidad (an embedded command-line Tomcat for running Rack apps) and Torquebox (JBoss AS plugins and standalone server for Rack, messaging, and more) are the two top web deployment options for JRuby these days. This is your chance to talk to the folks behind them and learn why you might choose one over the other. Beyond JRuby Every good conference needs talks that are either non-technical or which push the boundaries of current tech. For that, we have Justin Gehtland, Michael Feathers, and Neal Ford presenting on aspects of the development process that plague us from day to day. Justin's talk Never Settle will help you learn to keep fighting for a better experience in both development and day-to-day life. Michael will present Your Sofware, It's Alive, emphasizing something too few developers realize: software projects are born, grow up, and die just like organisms. And the always excellent Neal Ford will present Abstraction Distractions, a survey of what sorts of designs and abstractions work and which ones don't (with examples ranging from the iPad to Maven) and how you can apply that to your own software. On the more technical side, Ian Dees will present JRuby, Not Just for Hard-Headed Pragmatists Anymore. Ian tackles the other side of JRuby, where you can utilize libraries from languages like Clojure or Scala and build your own languages using tools like BiteScript. JRuby's more than just a Ruby implementation...and I'm sure Ian will show some good reasons why. And finally, there's Russ Olsen presenting Eloquent JRuby. Russ will show something I've been dying to see: best practices for a JRuby application that keeps Javaisms from leaking into your beautiful Ruby world. JRuby Core Team Of course we'll have a session to update you on JRuby's status and future. Tom Enebo and I will talk about: invokedynamic and its impact on JRuby; a new intermediate representation compiler we're working on; JRuby 1.7, Ruby 1.9.x, and Java 7 plans; and the status of JRuby adoption, platforms (like cloud, mobile, embedded), and community. More to Come! We're still ironing out the last few speakers, and will try to post an update in the next week. But do you really need more reasons to attend? One Last Thing With that, I'd like to personally invite you to attend JRubyConf 2011. JRuby has really come into focus over the past year, and I really love hearing from current and potential JRuby users. We're building this thing for you, and we're putting this conference on for you, so come out to D.C. and tell us what you're doing with JRuby or what you'd like to see from us in the future. JRuby is an important tool every Rubyist should have in their toolbox. Come to JRubyConf 2011 and let our excellent speakers tell you why!

Steppin’ Out: See You in Seattle »

Created at: 07.07.2011 02:20, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community events cascasia rubyconf JRubyConf jrubykaigi OSCON RubyKaigi

Photo courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives

Ruby MRI, JRuby and Rubinius Throwdown Brodown »

Created at: 01.07.2011 01:34, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community events Open Source jruby rubinius Ruby MRI Webinar

At RailsConf I had just given a thorough, yet humorous, overview of why everyone should run their production Ruby web applications on JRuby or Rubinius. I introduce into evidence exhibit A, the video replay of my 15 minute keynote. My beloved friend Aaron “Tenderlove” Patterson then stood up to give his own keynote and publicly rejected all my good advice with, "Ignore what Dr Nic said, [don’t use Rubinius or JRuby]. I’m on the MRI core team, so I think you should use that instead.” (paraphrased) Oh really, Aaron. This calls for a Ruby Platforms Virtual Brodown. I invite you all to join us for the webinar event. We’ve lined up a great panel of folks. Each awesome panelist will represent a different implementation: Ruby MRI, JRuby or Rubinius.

Ruby Platforms Virtual Brodown

• The Ecosystem: What works where, integrations and other capabilities to know about
• Tooling: Profiling, debugging, monitoring, VPN introspection
• Concurrency: Threading models and doing two things simultaneously
• Windows: Life on planet Windows
• Deployment: Sample stacks and how to run in production