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Partook of the all-day tutorial put on by Dave “that’s Roootes” Thomas and Mike “it’s Rowtes” Clark. It would have been a lot more enjoyable if I’d managed to sleep more than 2 hours last night, probably just keyed up from the 6.5 hour drive from Vancouver, 4 cups of coffee and jitters about how to keep my spand-branking new laptop from disappearing - it’s my first one, can you tell?

One key point Dave and Mike emphasized early on was that most of Rails is Ruby code, so the framework should really be called “Rails on Ruby”. In short - if you want to understand Rails, you’ve got to understand Ruby. This point was reiterated at the break by newly-met lunchmates as we ate the not-too-bad box lunch in the cavernous exhibit hall. They agreed that David A. Black’s book “Ruby for Rails”, while slightly outdated (Ruby 1.8.4, Rails 1.0), demystifies the “magic code” in Rails by explaining the key Ruby concepts and structures underlying Rails.

Some observations:

• Upon a show of hands, the audience was split about even between those who had written at least one Rails app, and those who were just getting their feet wet. I saw only one hand go up in response to the question as to how many participants were “super-comfortable” coding Ruby.

• After reading the lively discussion on Ruby and Women following Gregory Brown’s post, I was expecting a 90%+ male audience, however the gender split in the tutorial audience was more like 80/20, some improvement over the anecdotes in the discussion.

• Also well applauded was the news mid-afternoon that the tutorial attendees had raised over $12,000 for the charities nominated on Pragprog’s Justgive.org donation page.

• On a dimmer note, I was pretty chuffed that the organizers didn’t do more to provide AC power throughout the room. I managed to piggyback on the third or fourth power bar daisychained from one of the few wall outlets thanks to a generous neighbour.

The Mike ‘n Dave show was very well put presented, knitting together a few concepts that had been puzzling me, Nubie that I am, like “where does it all go?” and “how does the view get the data from the controller?”. Much of this is explained in Thomas’ book “Active Web Development with Rails”, but somehow hearing him explain it made it clearer. Somehow.

So what about the tutorial content? The first third of the day was a whirlwind introduction to and overview of Ruby, followed by a dissection of an example Rails app, with a potpourri of topics like migrations, REST and Capistrano rounding out the day.

T minus 3 days and counting! If the wireless network works OK, and my batteries last, I will attempt to post notes and comments from Railsconf2007 in sunny Portland, OR.

I work for a big systems engineering firm (big by Canadian standards) with over 30 years of system and software engineering success. Much of that success is attributed to the company’s conservative, risk-averse engineering culture. Nonetheless, a few brave souls within the company are embracing and succeeding with Agile ways. Ruby on Rails promises to ratchet Agile productivity up a notch or two, even for conservative, risk-averse enterprise projects.

In December 2005, Quoted-Printable published a link to a thought-provoking article by Obie Fernandez on the business value of Ruby on Rails. Fernandez predicted a big gain for RoR in 2006, thanks to the “productivity arbitrage” gains of RoR . So, did RoR gain ground in 2006? Was Fernandez on the money? Here’s my totally unscientific search for the truth:

David Heinemeier Hansson first released Rails to the world in July 2004. According to a graph produced on Google Trends, the phrase “Ruby on Rails” makes its first appearance in Google searches in early 2005, climbs steadily through the rest of the year, then declines in 2006. Google provides no scale for the number of hits in the vertical scale (there must be a more scientific term for this), so all of the comparisons that follow are relative.

Over the same period, the terms “Java” and “J2EE” declined slightly on Google. A search for “Spring framework”, representing the latest trend toward lightweight Java, shows a gain through 2005 followed by a marked decline in 2006.

So does this mean RoR is not gaining ground, or that web users are not searching for these terms as much as they first did, sort of a “framework fatigue” setting in?

Currently in a search for the term “Rails” on Google, eight of the first ten results are directly related to Ruby on Rails. The first five results point to Ruby on Rails-related sites, followed by Rails of Sheffield’s “New and used model railways.” The result may reveal more about Google’s indexing algorithms than shifting patterns in the search term, but it provides some insight.

In the mean time, the first Railsconf in mid-June 2006, sponsored by non-profit advocacy group Ruby Central, sold out to an audience of 600. This year Ruby Central partnered with tech publishing behemoth O’Reilly to double the number of seats at Railsconf 2007 in Portland, Oregon.

Prompted by a fevered posting to the Rubyonrails weblog, last Monday, I succumbed to the hype and registered, even before I had the go-ahead from my employer’s professional development program coordinator (yes, they have a great training and pro-D program!).

As of this posting, the conference is already three-quarters sold out, one week after registration opened!

Glad I bought my ticket early.