I’ll be heading to Portland, Oregon for a keynote at RailsConf 2007, May 17-20. I gather that like most Ruby-related events it sold out more or less instantly. There’s a funny story about how I came to attend.

What happened was, somebody at O’Reilly, who are staging the event, contacted me wondering if Sun might like to sponsor. The idea sounded plausible, so I put them in touch with the right Marketing folk, and the idea sounded plausible to them too. The discussion involved giving a keynote, and we had a call with Chad Fowler, Rails and Ruby community leader, conference chair, and all-around good guy.

I said that I’d love to come and give a talk about some of the technology issues worrying me, in particular integration problems. Rails is good but that doesn’t mean that Java or PHP or .NET are going away, or legacy Cobol apps for that matter, and we’re just gonna have to figure out how to make these things play nice together, and if you don’t believe in WS-*, then what do you believe in?

On the other hand, if what people wanted was a corporate keynote, along the lines of “Sun’s products rock, we love ya, love us back” we should send a VP with some real corporate heft.

Chad thought the technical session would be more interesting. But then he said “Uh, but you know, could you maybe talk about why Sun is all hot on Ruby and Rails too?” Not unreasonable, I guess.



Contributions

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From: Dr Nic (Apr 16 2007, at 00:45)

I think the community of contributors to Rails + its surrounding systems would love to hear your thoughts on Rails in the Enterprise, etc. Dave Thomas did this last year and I for one was motivated by many of his points to extend Ruby/Rails to tackle some of the things he raised (Composite Keys, DRYing up model files, etc).

Whilst there is a lot of "Rails is no good because it can't do XXX" talk in blogs + blog comments, whilst we're at Railsconf it will be happy family time and a good chance to discuss what parts of Rails/Ruby we can extend next.

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From: Nicola Larosa (Apr 16 2007, at 01:19)

> But then he said "Uh, but you know, could you maybe

> talk about why Sun is all hot on Ruby and Rails too?"

Yeah, as a long-time Pythonista, I would like to know that too.

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