Robby on Rails

Jeremy and I arrived back to Portland on late Saturday afternoon. I am already looking to schedule some time to go back to Vancouver, B.C. to visit again for a short trip away from work stuff. :-)

I wanted to take a few minutes to post some links that relate to Canada on Rails... and if you have more… email me them or post them as comments. :-)

• Canada on Rails
• Canada on Rails – SeedWiki

Bloggers

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

• CoR reviewed by Linux Journal

Talks/Slides

• Rails Engines, James Adam
• Getting started with AJAX on Rails, Amy Hoy
• RadRails, Kyle Shank
• Less Technology, Alex Bunardzic
• Advanced Rails AJAX techniques, Thomas Fuchs
• Gruff – graphs for Ruby, Geoffrey Grosenbach
• Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System, Robby Russell
• Globalizing Rails, Jeremy Voorhis

Photos

• Flickr – Canada on Rails (192 photos so far!)

Well… Canada on Rails is over. There was an afterparty… and pictures will be uploaded in the next day. I had the priviledge of meeting many….many… many… talented… bright… and high maintenance people over the past few days. I went out of my way to go and introduce myself to several people and when you’re a speaker it seems to make that process even easier for others to ask you how you use Rails to solve certain types of problems. As Legacy systems, databases are problems that many people are encountering… it was comforting that people at the conference were highly interested in learning more.

The afterparty was alright… it got really exciting when a few of us decided to venture to a pub away from the club where the party was. Within 30 minutes… everybody followed. I got stuck sitting next to DHH and we got to discuss many topics with each other… such as legacy systems and how AR can be bent a little in one direction… but it’s not going to be the perfect solution for older problems. I have some work cut out for me. :-)

While I had him there… I was able to discuss prototyping with him. For example, does 37signals use prototypes that get thrown away? I’m not convinced that he’d agree with me... :but from how he described their process, which I can only assume is far from perfect and is evolving just as much as any of our processes… that they are onto something. It was entertaining and highly educational.

I have much more blogging to do…. and it’s true… Thomas Fuchs is really a direct descendent of Bon Jovi… and David Goodlad is really a Good Lad from Canada.

I’ll be posting stuff in the next few days about acts_as_legacy. For those not at Canada on Rails... I announced a small project that I’m going to be working on.

Acts as Legacy!

Here are my slides… up til I tried to do a live demo. ;-)

# Inventory model
class Inventory < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_legacy :table_name => 'inventory',
                 :primary_key => 'prod_id',

  has_one :product, :foreign_key => self.primary_key

  column_alias :quan_in_stock, :stock

end   

Let’s try something a little different…

# SalesPerson model
class SalesPerson < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_legacy :table_name => 'sales_person',
                 :primary_key 'sales_p_id',
                 :column_alias => 'sales_p_'

  validates_presence_of( :name, :email, :phone ) 
end

# usage....
SalesPerson.find( 7 ).sales_p_name
=> 'Nigel'
SalesPerson.find( 7 ).name
=> 'Nigel'

The Slideshow

• Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System (quicktime)
• Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System (flash)

...Jeremy posted his slides as well. :-)

It’s late on Thursday evening… I’m fixing a few slides after getting some inspiration this afternoon. Jeremy and I were interviewed by Obie Fernandez for some Rails DVD thing. He asked us about our work at PLANET ARGON.... and right after that we headed back to the hotel with Topfunky… for another interview… which should show up on the RoR Podcast in the near future. :-)

I get to speak in 12.hours.from.now. Then… I can watch Jeremy speak and then relax the rest of my time here. :-)

Hopefully I can get over this cold by tomorrow morning…

As luck would have it… half way through my first day here… I start to feel ill. :-/ I’m taking a short break from the conference to catch up on a little rest that was passed up in favor of hanging out with some great people last night. About twenty of us went out last night and of that twenty… ten were speakers! I posted a few pictures on Flickr last nightl

This morning started with DHH giving a hour and a half talk about the next step with Rails… which went rather well and I’m excited to hear that they’re going to clean up some of the extra baggage in Rails Core and push stuff to plugins. Goodbye… Pagination and Web Services!

He also had some kind words for people who don’t get the Rails way of doing things…

Joe O’Brien followed him with a talk about SOA and Rails.

I’m going to catch up on some rest, work on a few slides and head back to the conference shortly. :-)

Check out the lastest pics on flickr from Canada on Rails.

I’m sitting at the Portland Airport with Jeremy… we have almost 2 hours to kill before our flight leaves. We love the free wifi at the PDX Airport. I took a few moments to upload some pictures to our flickr account and thought I’d take a moment to mention some cool news.

Jeremy Voorhis, Lead Architect at PLANET ARGON will be writing a book for O’Reilly. He mentioned it on his blog this morning it appears. :-)

Congrats Jeremy!

Keep your eyes on the Canada on Rails Flickr group!