Rails 101 - Brian McCallister

Sessions run concurrently at the Philly Emerging Technologies conference, which means it’s impossible to cover everything at once. After the keynote, I sat in on Brian McCallister’s “Rails 101” session. There was an overflow audience and people literally stood in the back for lack of chairs. This tells me that not only is there a lot of interest in Ruby on Rails in general (pretty well established), there’s a lot of interest in Rails in Greater Philly – an often-overlooked center of technology.

Since this was a 101 course, there was a lot of putting Rails in the context of other languages. Many folks out of the audience had primarily Java experience, and Brian accounted for that with comparisons where possible and appropriate.

Some basic on Rails: It’s an application framework written wholly in Ruby. The people who wrote it did a lot of work in Java, which is evident in the design aspects, and some of Rails (Web aspects) also looks like php.

According to Brian, there are a few principles behind Rails:

• Write less code – the more code you have, the more opportunities for mistakes
• Convention over configuration – write code based on common conventions
• Opinionated – the writers of Rails assume that people are going to write code in an obvious way. You can do it differently, but Rails was developed assuming you won’t and makes the “obvious way” the default/easy way.

The full session was highly interactive, with detailed Q&A throughout. (Sample: Q- The infrastructure I work with does not include Ruby. Could I leverage JRuby? Yes! The recent release of JRuby almost entirely supports Rails.)

Want to know more? The presentation will be available on this site shortly. Please note, I am not a developer, but if you have specific technical questions, add a comment to this post or send an email to Chariot. We’ll hook you up with a Rails expert.