No Fluff Just Stuff 2007 Orlando, Day Three
Originally posted 2007-09-11 13:05:45
Day three started with Bruce Tate, Ruby, and Rails. Tate isn’t entertaining nor dynamic (a la Scott Davis), but his presentation skills suffice and his material is excellent. Leading Java developers bemoan his defection to Ruby for a reason.
I’ve been playing with Rails and Ruby (see my password management program at http://safe.rubyforge.org), but I have much to learn about the Ruby way. For example, I understand what duck typing and mix-ins are, but I don’t understand when or why you’d use them, nor do I really get their power yet. Tate’s presentations pushed me farther along that path.
He brought up irb and demonstrated that the number 4 is of class Fixnum:
irb(main):001:0> 4.class
=> Fixnum
He then showed how to make 4 quack like a duck:
irb(main):002:0> class Fixnum
irb(main):003:1> def quack
irb(main):004:2> puts \"quack\"
irb(main):005:2> end
irb(main):006:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):007:0> 4.quack
quack
=> nil
I was amused. A coworker was offended. Another coworker was aghast. After the presentation he ranted, \”He made 4 quack! Do you not see a problem with that? I can just imagine: you go to a restaurant, order peking duck, and they bring you peking 4?!?!?!?\” They see both Ruby and Rails as antithetical to disciplined and well-communicated coding approaches, doomed to fail in teams of multiple developers over multiple locations. I reserve judgment.
I then had to attend a Scott Davis presentation because his keynote was so darn entertaining, so I went to his presentation on REST. He posited that SOAP is too hard and its days have come and gone. No news there. He started diving into REST and idempotence and then popped a big statement: REST is the CRUD of HTTP. Wow. He dug into HTTP GETs and PUTs and POSTs and DELETEs and it all made sense, and I got all fired up to jump into Atom and Yahoo Search APIs and Google Map APIs. This makes sense! I foresee web frameworks and web services becoming more RESTful in the near future.
I finished with Ted Neward’s presentation on Rules Engines and Jess. I wish it had been more focused on rules engines in general, and had used JBoss Rules to illustrate how rules engines work, but the presentation was interesting nonetheless. I certainly learned a lot more about Lisp.
Every presentation I’d been to until this last one was run on Mac OS X. Neward’s presentation was run on Windows XP. I looked over at his laptop, expecting a Dell, and instead saw a Mac! Very strange.