(See the morning report, if you haven’t already)

After the lunch break, these were the highlights of Paris on Rails:

1. Christophe Porteneuve talked about Prototype, the project where he is one of the core developers, and also author of THE book about Prototype! Great stuff: he explained everything there’s to know about JavaScript bindings (and the Prototype “bind” method); he also gave an excellent overview of the enumeration methods of Prototype (incredible stuff!), the new Response object in the latest version of Prototype, and also a nice talk about event bubbling. JavaScript 2000%!! To sum it up: this guy is a great presenter, very funny and knowledgeable, and his speech is more than worth the trip to Paris!
2. Sylvain Perez and Guillaume Desrat (president of Ruby France and rubyist since 2002!) enlightened us about how they introduced Rails in RBC Dexia Investor Services making it interact with their SOA, DataWarehouse and backend services, what were the challenges (some), the rewards (many) and the tradeoffs (a few) during that integration. Maybe that “Thought Leader” of James Mc Govern will finally understand that not only Rails is ready for prime time… but it is already used in big “enterprisey” environments!
3. Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine and Jean-François Arcand gave an extremely interesting talk about JRuby, GlassFish and Java in general, and how Ruby is slowly gaining momentum in the Java world! And Jean-François made it really fun to follow thanks to his nice Canadian accent :)
4. David Heinemeier Hansson himself direct from Chicago! He talked over the iChat link about all the new features of Rails 2.0, about backward compatibility issues and how to solve them.
5. Finally, Jean-Michel Garnier from 21croissants (a Barcelona-based RoR company) convinced us that testing is a really important thing to do (which you already knew, by the way, isn’t it?) and how to use RSpec, rcov, CruiseControl.rb, Test::Unit and Selenium in your applications, putting it in context (historically, citing Fred Brooks and Kent Beck, and methodologically, citing Martin Fowler). As Jean-Michel said in his speech, 2008 will be the year of RSpec; and when I look at it, I think he’s right: in RSpec, the spec is the test; the spec is the doc; the doc is the spec. And the other way around, too :)

It is interesting to see some trends in the current Rails landscape:

• There’s an interesting ongoing debate about IDEs: Aptana (ex-RadRails), NetBeans, Visual Studio or… TextMate?
• JRuby is available in stable form: there’s a bunch of new opportunities opening right now!
• Ruby and Rails are both getting the “acceptance status seal” of big companies: it is no longer a “toy” technology.

One thing is fundamentally true: this platform has taken the world as a storm. I’ve first blogged about it in July 2005, and I firmly believe today that any serious software developer should (at least) learn a little bit about it. Rails is here to stay, whether you like it or not. Compare my reports to what happened in Paris on Rails 2006: lots of things have happened in the Rails world, and more are bound to happen in 2008.

All in all, an excellent conference, with around 220 people attending it, from France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and even Spain! I’d be happy to talk here next year ;)

Update, 2007-12-11: Peter Sayer, whom I met yesterday in the conference, and shared a few impressions about the current Rails landscape, has published a very good article about it!

The morning sessions of Paris on Rails can be summarized as follows:

1. An introduction to Ruby and Rails done by Laurent Juillard from nuxos: interesting for those that never used Ruby before, and a good thing to do given the number of people in the room that are new to the platform in general. Otherwise, quite boring for those of us who already use it :) But the right thing to do nevertheless.
2. A real-life use case of Ruby on Rails, shown by Aurélien Géron from Wifirst: a very interesting explanation of a company that chooses to jump on the Rails wagon, with answers to both the “why” and the “how”. Very funny explanation of how they had to deal with the Pythonistas inside the company who wanted to use Django instead :) The most interesting thing about this talk is the fact that they will release their webmail application as open source!
3. Yann Lugrin, CTO of Liquid Concept (from Lausanne!) explained about the trouble to “internationalize” a Rails application (particularly about the IMHO biggest problem in Ruby: the lack of direct UTF-8 support!), and how you can use the Globalize plugin to make your sites multi-lingual and multi-cultural. I’m happy I’ve used it to make Parking Friend available in several languages :) Globalize rocks!
4. Finally, Nicolas Mérouze from Yeastie Mobs talked about HAML as an alternative to ERB as the template language for Rails, and how it compares to other options like Markaby or DRYML or MasterView. Very interesting! HAML seems a little bit “Pythonesque” for my taste :) but that’s my opinion. Nicolas also made an interesting comment about SASS and Blueprint, which I had heard about, but never looked at in detail.

In any case, I still have trouble with the technical names and buzzwords in French :) I’m too used to the English versions! Other than that, a nice first part. Let’s see what comes in the afternoon! Now it’s time to have something to eat :)

Update: Read the afternoon report!

It’s 09:07 AM in Paris, and after a wild 1h30 ride from Paris Orly (!) I’m right at the heart of Paris on Rails, second edition! I’ll be posting news during the day about what’s being said, who I meet there, and all kinds of gossip.

Stay tuned!