RubyConf 2007 - Day 2 - "The Ruby VM Smackdown Begins"

As the sun rose over the hills of North Carolina, the quiet betrayed a seething fire blazing in the hearts of three development teams. "Three teams enter, one team leaves!" Yes, I am talking about the main event, people, the one, the only, Ruby VM Smackdown! The room was jam packed, the anticipation was high.

As good fortune would have it, I was sitting right next to the head of the team who was my personal favorite to win the day. Yes, I am referring to Evan Phoenix, leader of Team Rubinius along with co-conspirator Ryan Davis. You should have seen the look at their faces when the JRuby team showed the Rubinius RSpec test suite as part of their demo! But I am getting ahead of myself...

I like the underdog in a fight, when the underdog is tough, and under-estimated by their opponents. On one side, the resources of Microsoft, on the other, the full power of Sun. And then, THE LADS. If you don't want to see that one go down, you have no passion for the cutting edge of innovation. And if you do not know about the history of innovation in the software industry, you might miscalculate the odds. Gentlemen, to your corners... I want a clean fight!

MC Chad Fowler got up, and gave a brief intro to the show. "We are about to see what Matz called 'wonderous' last night," he said. And it was true.

First up, was John Lam of Microsoft with IronRuby armed with "State of IronRuby".

Next, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo of Sun with JRuby using "Ruby for the JVM" style.

Last, the challenger, Evan Phoenix with Rubinius wielding "Rubinius 1.0".

Wow. Bread and circuses, indeed!

I will be posting individually about each of the Ruby VM contestants, and will update the above links when I am done...

After all that excitement, the crowd was starved. We shuffled out to eat our lunches, and converse on all we had seen. From everyone I spoke with, the mood in the crowd was firmly in the Rubinius corner, with a close second to JRuby, with third place probably going to YARV. Hardly anyone I spoke with at RubyConf had any interest in using IronRuby at all!

That is to be expected from a conference like RubyConf, well known for its strong ABM (Anything But Microsoft) attitude, which is pretty unfair. That said, I think the uptake in the .NET community will be the measure of the success of IronRuby, not whether they can get the typical RubyConf attendee to switch back to Windows.

In the afternoon, I got to see some great sessions, from:

"Refactotum: Ruby" - Stuart Halloway
"Maximizing Productivity" - Eric Hodel
"Mac OS X Loves Ruby" - Laurent Sansonetti

I will be posting individually for each session when I get a chance, and will update the links here.

Once the afternoon's sessions had wrapped up, a large group of us overran a local BBQ joint named Mac's, with tasty BBQ, a great beer selection, and a bunch of Harleys in the parking lot. Despite our somewhat atypical appearance (nerd chic) for NC, we were welcomed warmly by the locals. There must've been 30+ people from RubyConf there, it was great!

We then returned at the perfect moment to hear Matz's keynote speech. And it was good. Really good. Matz is charming, and quite funny. His wit was so much better able to emerge in a forum where he was simply presenting, rather than the somewhat less successful "town hall" format that had been attempted the evening before. I have a separate posting with his remarks which will be up later:

RubyConf 2007 - Keynote by Matz

Once the keynote had ended, I just had to go up and shake the man's hand. I know it may be corny, but I really did suddenly appreciate what he really does, which is to inspire the community. People keep looking to Matz for all the answers, but the answers are up to us, my friends. No superheros, remember?

Afterwards, I want to the legendary RejectConf, held right next door. Don't ask me how I wedged my way in, but I did it. To everyone who's toes I stepped on: sorry! There was a fun series of lightning talk (5-10 min) presentations of pretty much brand-new stuff. The beauty of RejectConf is its appeal to the ADD'd-out techno-junkie: every few minutes something else. I will be posting a rundown of RejectConf when I get a chance here:

RubyConf 2007 - RejectConf

RejectConf was really a great highlight of RubyConf. Once they kicked us out, the entire crowd immediately migrated directly next door to the hotel bar where we drank beers and chatted loudly about techno-babble to our great enjoyment. I staggered up to my room, to rest up and prepare myself for Day 3.

More Developer Fun In Los Angeles

Last night was the always entertaining Los Angeles Application Developer Meetup. L.A. is not known for the same massive quantity of developers as the bay area, for example, but having joined forces with the LA Ruby on Rails Meetup crew some time back, the monthly event is still growing.

This month's was held at the impressive new digs of YellowPages.com, who have been busy building out a huge Ruby on Rails based local search replacement for their venerable 100K+ lines of Java code. Thanks for the great sandwiches, boys... next time, buy beer!

Anyhow, four presentations took place on various fun topics of technical interest. First, Jeff Yamada and his associate (sorry I didn't catch your name) showed AIR. I then did a short presentation on Continuous Integration and CruiseControl.rb. Olmo Maldonado talked about his impressive JavaScript library MooTools, and then Ari Lerner showed his just-relased Ruby web development framework, Sinatra.

AIR
Long, long ago, I used to work with Flash and ActionScript. Most of us more "serious" programmers were always very frustrated with the language, the programming environment, pretty much everything except for the final product. Since then Adobe has introduced technologies like Flex and AIR to try to address the shortcomings of using Flash as a "real" development tool. Yamada and friend are the authors of the upcoming book "AIR Bible". AIR nee Apollo is designed to provide a way to create native OS applications, while using the toolset that Flash/Flex developers are used to. If you are into Flash/Flex already, then this is probably great for you, but I am not overly in love with so many angle brackets mixed in my code... let's just say that "it ain't Ruby". One small thing I will suggest to the boys: please try to find some relevant application to show for a demo a of a new technology. Between this, and what all of the Microsofties were show a few months back for Silverlight, no one is going to take this new desktop app paradigm seriously!

How To Get Your Code Together and Keep It That Way
Then I did a presentation myself, called "How To Get Your Code Together and Keep It That Way". It was really an exhortation to use the best practice of Continuous Integration, while showing how easy it is to get started with the ultra-cool CI tool CruiseControl.rb. If you are a Rails dev, and you are not using CruiseControl.rb yet, you should be. If you have a development project with greater than zero developers, it is worth it to setup a CI system, even just to keep yourself in check. You can get a copy of my presentation here. But don't just believe me, it is in yesterday's O'Reilly Radar too.

As I was demoing the CC.rb project page, where they are doing CI builds of both CruiseControl.rb itself and the Ruby on Rails project, I noticed that the Rails build has had failing unit tests since Oct. 3. What is up with that? Let's get on it boys!

MooTools
Next up was Olmo Maldonado, once of the authors of MooTools. MooTools is a JavaScript framework for web development along the lines of Prototype or jQuery. I had been hearing about MooTools, but hadn't really checked it out. Naturally, since both of those other JS frameworks already exist, and with Prototype really having dominated in the acceptance wars, MooTools does have a different approach on several levels to justify its existence.

Heavily optimized for speed, according to Maldonado, Moo performs much faster than either Prototype or jQuery on the slickspeed benchmark test at performing DOM selects, which is the core convenience provided by any JS framework.

Another difference is that MooTools libs are completely orthogonal. As such, the developer only needs to incorporate the specific libs that contain the functionality that is required for that application, unlike both Prototype and jQuery which require downloading the entire framework to use any part of it.

MooTools seems to have a more serious emphasis on good software devlopment practices than the othe JS framework projects. One example of this is that MooTools was developed using JSSpec, which is a Behavior Driven Development framework for JavaScript.

Already up to version 1.2, MooTools has been adopted in some very interesting places. The three demos that Maldonado showed were the iPhone version of the Pop-Cap game Bejeweled, the Ubuntu.com website, and then most curious of all, the Microsoft Expression website! What, M$ couldn't use Silverlight? Oh yeah, everyone already has Javascript... no additional download required. Whatever happened to that famous dogfooding?

MooTools is realy designed for the developer who wants to work in pure JavaScript. Most Rails devs like to use the Ruby on Rails Prototype helpers to do nice AJAX-y things like edit in-place and auto-complete functionality. MooTools does all that, plus has a bunch of UI gadgetry too, but having no inline functions, is not really compatible with the way the Rails helpers work. Perhaps someone will create a Rails plug-in that can collect up all of the MooTools Javascript, kida like what the Unobtrusive Javascript plugin does... for those Rails people who want to take advanatge of the DSL-like syntax, instead of dropping all the way into JavaScript.

Sinatra
Speaking of DSLs, the final presentation of the evening was by Ari Lerner, showing his incredibly cool new little Ruby web framework called Sinatra. In fact, I was so impressed by Sinatra, that I decided to give it its own posting. I suggest you go check it out right now!

Silverlight and Ruby?

Today, Microsoft announced their Silverlight technology platform. I will not bore you, kind reader, with yet another recap of what has already been written by so many others already.

However, there are a couple of curious details that have piqued my interest. John Lam, of RubyCLR fame, made an interesting comment on his blog earlier today about Silverlight:

This was a major reason why I moved my family to the other side of the continent...

Even more interesting, is a bit from Chinese news site CSDN, which is poorly translated here:

6, in addition, Silverlight designers and developers to provide a large number of development tools and development support. 对设计者来说，Expression Design和Expression Blend软件可以创建可重用界面，Expression Web使得在符合W3C标准的网站开发中可以使用XHTML、XML、XSLT、CSS以及ASP.NET等工具。To the designers, Expression and Expression Blend Design software can be re-established use interface Expression Web made in the development of the website with W3C standards can be used XHTML. XML, XSLT, CSS and ASP.NET tools. 对开发者来说，基于Visual Studio的Web开发支持包括ASP.NET AJAX在内的技术，并支持JavaScript，C#，VB，Ruby以及Python等多种开发语言。For developers, Visual Studio's Web-based support, including the technical AJAX ASP.NET and support JavaScript, C #, VB, Ruby and Python and other development languages.

So what is up? Is Ruby the programming language for Silverlight? Or at least one programming language option? Will dynamic languages take over the new desktop?