Juixe Techknow

Justin Gehtland of Relevance gave a RubyConf session titled Streamlined: A Framework for Data-centric Web Applications. Streamlined is a Ruby on Rails application that is meant to be used in the back-end to manage and administer application data. According to Justin, these back-end administrative views are repetitive and similar, usually with a login, tabular data, and CRUD support. Justin was tired of hacking these administration views for clients so his company developed Streamlined. Right out the box, Streamlined supports authorization, pagination, user preferences, and in a future release it will support role based authorization. Justin mentions that Streamlined goes beyond scaffolding and provides a feature rich ajax powered relationship management. As he stated, “To quote one of our preeminent thinkers of our time, Paris Hilton, ‘that’s HOT!'” Streamlined uses ajax views by default but this can be easily changed. In most situations all you need is to replace the CSS to get started with Streamlined as it provides the 80% of a clients’ requirements. For the remaining 20%, Streamlined allows custom views and has a great declarative DSL for modifying the default behavior.
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Ryan Davis and Jacob Harris came up with a fantastic idea of holding a RejectConf after the scheduled RubyConf sessions. RejectConf was held saturday night after Matz keynote and was made up of 5 to 10 minutes talks by rubyist whose session proposal was shot down by the RubyConf selection committee. RejectConf was definitely a high light of the conference and thanks to however brought the three cases of beer!!!

The first reject of the night was Steven Baker who gave a top ten list of why not to use RSpec. It seems that RSpec does not get any respect, in a very Rodney Dangerfield-like way. According to Steven, if you use RSpec that is great, if you don’t that is better yet. Here is the first reason why you should not use RSpec, Steven was drunk when he wrote it. The next reason, Documentation is overrated. Moving down the list to the second reason not to use RSpec, tests that don’t read anything like English prevent customers from pointing out glaring errors in business logic. And the top reason not to use RSpec, because explaining to new members of your team that you really can test something that doesn’t exist is fun.
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Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto, the language designer of Ruby, gave the keynote speech for RubyConf 2006. The keynote was titled The Return of the Bikeshed or Nuclear Plant in the Backyard. I didn’t know what the bike shed and nuclear power plant in the title referred to. I later discovered that is refers to Parkinson’s Law which in essence states that the least important the decision the more people have an opinion about it, because most people don’t have solutions for hard problems. The title of the keynote set the theme for the night.

According to Matz, Ruby is a programming, scripting, lightweight, and dynamic language. Matz noted the difference between some of these. He stated that the term lightweight language is popular in Japan where as scripting language is detested in the states. Yet Ruby is all of these and more…
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Michael Granger gave a RubyConf 2006 presentation on Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation in Ruby. Michael gave some interesting demos where he was able to break a sentence into its grammatical building blocks such as subject, verb, and noun. He was also able to translate a sentence into a more generic version of itself. This session was a personal favorite although I don’t have a current need for language processing libraries.

Here is a list of Ruby libraries which Michael recommends:
Stemmable – an implementation of Porter Stemming Algorithm.
Chronic – a natural language date/time parser written in pure Ruby.
Ruby WordNet – Ruby WordNet is a Ruby interface to the WordNet Lexical Database.
Ruby LinkParser – Ruby port of the perl module Lingua::LinkParser used to determine the structure of a sentence.
Ruby Linguistics – A Ruby framework that integrates Ruby WordNet, Ruby LinkParser. Here is some code of Ruby Linguistics in use:
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Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems gave an insightful presentation on Internationalization (I18N), Multilingualization (M17N), and unicode. Even Tim who has spent most of his career in unicode support add admitted that “for some this is not the most stimulating subject.” Tim asked the audience of programmers, “why do we care about internationalization?” The reason is not so obvious to native English speakers but the answer can be found online. English is no longer the predominant language of the internet. A software project should think about localization (L10N) and internationalization from the onset. According to Tim, it doesn’t make much sense to develop and application that does not support I18N, M17N, and L10N.

Tim stated that if you had the following regular expression piece of code, it is probably a bug:

/[a-zA-Z]+/

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Because Josh Susser was unavailable for his RubyConf session, the organizers opened the time slot to the audience members, allowing each 5 to 10 minutes for demos or presentations. Here are some of the noteworthy presentations from this time slot.

Someone from NOAA presented on Ruby Queue. Ruby Queue is a tool for building linux clusters. The speaker recommended that Ruby Queue be used in small research teams with between 5 to 30 nodes. Here is a description of Ruby Queue from its website, “ruby queue (rq) is a tool used to create instant linux clusters by managing sqlite databases as nfs mounted priority work queues”

Someone else presented on irb tips and tricks. One great tip was a short script that allows irb to maintain a shell-like history. If you are like most Rubyist, you use the irb console for a lot of prototyping. Make your life a bit easier and trick out your irb. The Tips and Tricks page listed above mentions several other useful tips such as tab completion.
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