With more than 3 days full of Rails and fun and meeting cool people from all around the world behind me, here’s what I took home from Railsconf Europe:

Sun and ThoughtWorks are really pushing JRuby

JRuby has been covered in 4 talks by speakers from both Sun and ThoughtWorks, who also were among the diamond sponsors of the conference.

It really looks like JRuby is ready for real life usage in J2EE environments, effectively bringing Rails into the so-called enterprise through the backdoor. Or, as Ola Bini put it,

JRuby is just another Java library.

Pretty impressed I immediately tried this stuff out - and it really works :-) Time to ditch Grails and have some fun with my favourite language instead.

Selenium

Till Vollmer’s presentation of the browser-based testing tool Selenium was quite impressive. I definitely have to try this out.

Webistrano

At Rejectconf which was organized by the Berlin Rails User Group, Jonathan Weiss gave a short introduction to Webistrano, which is a web-based frontend to Capistrano. Great way to get designers and editors without a local Ruby/Capistrano installation involved in the development process.

Report #12

Besides telling us that it’s time to put the party hats and James Dean jackets aside for a while, and instead get some real work done (and of course have fun) with Rails, DHH introduced report #12, which basically is a list of well-tested patches that have been approved by at least 3 other people. This formalization of the peer-review process is a really good thing as it takes some of the work load away from the core team and makes it easier for people to contribute.

Rails developers are happier

We all knew this, but it’s good even Sun’s Craig R. McClanahan noted in his inspiring talk that he never saw that many friendly and happy people at JavaOne, as he saw at Railsconf Europe. He also admitted that going back to Java after having worked with Rails is not that pleasant. Just to remind you - he’s working at the company whose ticker symbol is JAVA…

All in all it was a great event, and even with Dr Nic speaking at the same time my own talk was pretty well attended,