I found this today - kudos to Carlos Brando for putting together an awesome reference! It’s a summary of all the new features rolled into Ruby on Rails 2.1.

Ruby on Rails 2.1 - What’s New

So today I attended:

• Keynote - Joel Spolsky is pretty entertaining, but I didn’t get a lot of substance out of his talk. He touched upon keeping users happy and what it take to do it. Overall, a humorous way to kick things off.
• Entrepreneurs on Rails - this was really inspiring. Dan Benjamin shared his experiences and some of the pitfalls. It was great to get some insight from someone that’s walked the path I’ve wanted to: start off as a service oriented business and break out into some product based businesses.
• 10 Things I Hate About Web Apps - I honestly wish I attended a different presentation. The end was ok, as the speaker introduced LimeLight - it looks like it could compete with AIR - what I liked is that it runs on JRuby - so anything with a JVM can run it.
• Faster, Better ORM with DataMapper - this was probably the highlight of the day. I really think DataMapper could be a replacement for ActiveRecord in the Rails framework. I’ve played with it when I was looking at merb. Better handling for legacy databases, eager and lazy loading. When version 1.0 comes out in the Summer, I will definitely look at it as a primary Ruby ORM.
• Flexible Scaling - this was a great talk. I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 (a scalable way to create infrastructure/hosts), but now I’m even more intrigued. What’s interesting is that the speaker is hosting his database cluster off of the cloud
• UI On Rails - Connecting Designers and Developers - I was kind of disappointed with this one. It seemed like it surprised a lot of people to give Designers access to source code, but Kyle seems to handle it without issue.

Overall it’s been a fun day, but man am I exhausted. My favorite session was definitely the one on DataMapper. I’m hoping Rails adds similar ORM options and configuration like Merb.

  map.resources :organizations do |organization|
    organization.resources :members, :member => {:activate => :get}
  end
  
  map.resources :organizations,
    :has_many => :members

There’s a lot of debate going on around these two blocks of code. Why am I opting for the top instead of the bottom? Because there’s no documentation for the bottom! I have no idea how to add a custom, member action to the has_many style of routing.

One thing is starting to annoy me about the latest revisions to Rails. Rails developers are very opinionated and want you as a fellow developer to follow recent conventions, but how can I follow a convention if there’s no documentation to support it?

Of course, I can’t really complain because I haven’t contributed to the documentation. My point is that if DHH and the rest of the core team have strong opinions about recent changes, they should put more of an emphasis on revising documentation to get people using the right conventions.

So I’m a big fan of David Allen’s GTD System. For a long time, I’ve been looking for a personal information system that could help me get the job done.

I’ve been extremely impressed with the early versions of Things. I’m starting to get very excited about their iCal sync feature.

If you’re looking for an electronic version of David Allen’s system, this is the tightest app I’ve seen for it. I especially like the “Areas” feature, as most apps I’ve used lack this feature.

Once I have the ical feature, I will be able to sync this info with my PDA. That’s really the only problem with Things in its current build. Once I’m able to access this information on the go, I’ll feel a lot better about having an offline app for this type of organization.

Most Rails developers know of PeepCode but I know only a few that have actually purchased a screencast from them. I’m really happy that they’ve reintroduced their year subscription. There’s no excuse now - go and buy this! After watching two or three I can say it’s already paid for itself.

Interestingly, I’m enjoying the pdf’s just as much as the screencasts. Keep it up PeepCode!

If you’re a cheapskate, start out over at RailsCasts - but if you like them, help Ryan out and buy some PeepCode material.