First Keynote With Dave Thomas

Kevin — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 15:28:00 -0600

Dave Thomas is the hot pragmatic programming guy apparently. His points follow:

Good news everybody!

People are using rails to actually do business!
The trendline for rails is going in the right direction
Matz in the man
Core is the man (or something)

But…There are still things to do. Unsolved problems according to Dave:

Data Integration

It would be neat if validations were added to models automatically from the schema
Foreign key support should be better (good point)
Primary keys are always integers? Is that cool?
Can we have composite primary keys please
Can we get better support for non-database-backed models

Real World Crud

Scaffolding brings people to rails. Why not improve it a bit? Rails is supposed to be the poster child of rails 2.0, but the current scaffolding is the worst of web 1.0.

Make it configurable (allow radio button, check boxes, etc)
Show off – use Ajax
Allow skinning.

Deployment

“Who has deployed a rails app,” he asks. (everyone raises their hand) “Who enjoyed it?” (like three people raise their hands)

Capistrano is the best thing out there; let’s make it better.
In the real world, developers often cannot just push code out to production when they please; developers know what to deploy, and sysadmins know where, how, and when to deploy.
So…how about if we had:
```
cap --deploy-on http://someserver.com
```

So suggesting these kinds of things for inclusion in rails core raises the question, why? Well, people use rails because it makes their lives easier. The rails community places a high premium on writing code that others can use. If we can help to lower the bar in terms of barrier to entry for rails, we can make other peoples’ lives easier. “All developers deserve to be happy.”

Good talk man – solid beginning for Railsconf.

notkeepingitreal.com: First Keynote With Dave Thomas

First Keynote With Dave Thomas

Data Integration

Real World Crud

Deployment