So today was the final day of RubyConf 2006, and I have to say, I was really eager to see Streamlined: A Framework for Data-centric Web Applications by Justin Gehtland, YARV: on Rails? by Koichi SASADA, and You got Ruby in my CLR! by John Lam. I think it was because I was so eager, that I somehow ended up sleeping in and missed the first 2 talks completely. Well, I did actually catch the last 2 questions posed to Matz and Koichi, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to see any of the content.

I suppose it’s all well and good, because after the YARV talk Chad Fowler ran his random raffle script through YARV, and it was fast enough that I was drooling. I hate to think of the effects the full presentation would’ve had on me.

After some other people won some books or something, John’s talk began. I was really hyped on this talk even though I’m not really a fan, nor a user, of Microsoft products. John’s talk was basically a general overview with some pretty decent demos and code samples of things he’s made, and that are possible, using his RubyCLR library, that’s a simple bridge between Ruby and the CLR.

I actually enjoyed a lot of the things John had to say, but I was a bit worried by some of the slides containing some Ruby code that he’s written. On at least 2 of them I saw things such as:

  ...
    do_this if something.else != nil
  ...

and

  ...
    true if another.long.thing.bool == true
  ...

Or very similar. Obviously the above lines threw up a bit of a red flag in my mind. It would be a shame if John put a ton of hard work and effort into a project as cool as this, simply to have it replaced, or unused because of a lack of Ruby idioms, or not being Ruby enough. However, that’s not to say that the api will be devoid of Ruby idioms, and I’m probably worried over nothing.

At any rate, he demoed some pretty interesting native windows applications that he’s written, and also some really cool irb capabilities. I’m really looking forward to using that project down the road.

Directly following John’s talk was an hour and a half break for lunch. For lunch I went to Whole Foods where I met a pretty cool developer named Greg who works for a company called USI in I believe DC, but my memory is crap. Greg had a pretty good idea about starting a social site to connect developers of open source projects with people who are willing to fund such projects. I can’t for the life of me remember the url for the google group he’s setup, and I lost the sheet of paper that I’d written it down on. Because of this, I’ll get it from a friend and then make a post about it or simply update this one.

After lunch was the portion of the conference alloted to 3 of the students from the Google Summer of Code projects, to give them a chance to tell us of their projects and how they’re coming along. Before the first GSoC talk, we were treated to a very hilarious one man play that mixed Star Trek with Ruby, Python, Smalltalk and Java. I believe it was Adam Keys who put on the show for us, but I was sitting too far back to see for sure who it was. Ryan Davis demanded that the act be recorded, so hopefully that happened and I’ll be able to edit with a link. Kudos to Adam for a very funny and well put together piece of entertainment.

Now let’s get on to the GSoC talks. First let me say that I unfortunately forgot all of the names of the students, so I’ll just give a brief overview of the talks as I remember them.

First up was a fairly interesting project called Ruport, which is basically a library for doing reporting in Ruby. We were treated to some detailed information about the project, and a pretty demo on some data from RubyForge.

Next up was an extremely interesting project (for me at least) regarding getting Ruby to run on mobile phones. Or more specifically, Symbian. This means that Nokia, among others, were being targeted. The student who gave the talk seems to have made some really cool progress, and I’m very eagerly awaiting completion of this project. He also made us aware of the fact that Perl and Python are both running fine on Symbian, so maybe I’ll start writing some Nokia games using PyGame.

The final talk of the conference was one that seemed pretty sweet, but not applicable to me in any way, as I don’t use Eclipse. Basically the project was trying to add code completion, method lookup and some other cool stuff into Eclispe. From the information provided to us, I got the feeling that a good amount of work as been done on this project, but nothing was demoed to us. I also started to drift off a few times during this talk, so I can’t remember many other details.

All in all I think I prefered RubyConf over RailsConf. I think the talks were really solid and well put together, and I think that the organizers did a fantastic job setting everything up.

That said, I’d still love to know what the ThoughtWorks sponsorship actually did for the ThoughtWorks sponsored dinner, as participation required the 75 dollar meal plan. Which, aside from the dinner, only bought you 3 lunches. To my knowledge no talks or anything went on during the dinner, but I didn’t pay the 75 bucks, so I’m not complaining.

Actually, I tried to get the meal plan as well. I actually registered a day late, and my meal plan and conference ticket were added to the waiting list. Funnily enough, my ticket came off of the waiting list when somebody canceled, but my meal ticket never did. I’ve heard several reasons for why it didn’t, however, I prefer to believe that there was a 1-1 allotment of meal tickets to conference tickets, and that the guy who returned my ticket just wanted to keep his food for whatever reason.

At the very end of the conference Chad Fowler assured us that there would be no cap on the number of seats they would sell next year. Let’s hope the same thing is done with meal tickets eh?