acts_as_conference 2008 - Day 1 Report

acts_as_conference started earlier today (now yesterday) in Orlando, Florida with Charity Session. Completely sold out with 165 attendees!



Ezra Zybmuntowicz (Merb core developer) talked about Merb.

What is Merb ?

• Started after tried to make Rails thread-safe and memory foot print lower.
• All (everything?) you need, none you don't.
• Key features of Merb are: Thread-safe, ORM-agnostic, JavaScript-library agnostic, and Template language agnostic.
• Replacement for ActionPack.
• Similar to Rails, fixes a bunch of problems like performance, memory collection.
• 2000 requests/second
• merb-core, merb-more, merb-plugins are some of the key components.

Read more about Why Merb ? (Speed, Lighweight, Powerful). In later discussions, Ezra told me that somebody on #merb IRC channel has already tried Merb on GlassFish. I'm certainly waiting for him to provide me more information on that. Unfortunately I could not find the chat archives :(

Then Evan Phonix (started Rubinius) talked about the "Ruby kernel written in Ruby". He talked about how Rubinius is a community-driven implementation (90 committers in last 365 days) and building a rich and high-performance environment for running Ruby code.

In the welcome session, Robert Dempsey explained the two goals for the conference - "wide & deep on variety of topics" and "technologies that integrate with Ruby". Here are some statistics presented:

• 30-70 people for every Rails meetup
• Orlando #16, Tampa #17 for Rails jobs

And some more gathered during another session:

• 90% using Rails as part of job
• 50% first time visitors to any Rails conf
• 50% local to Orlando

The last session of the day was a nice talk by Dan Benjamin on "Simplicity". I enjoyed his metaphors for emphasizing how simplicity in user interface is important to meet customer's requirement and keep him happy. Here are the two quotes he used: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" by Einstein and "Simplicity is the key to happiness in the modern world" by Dalai Lama.

The party at Orlando Ale House was a good blast. Here are some pictures:


And finally the day ended with dinner @ GOL! The Taste of Brazil - highly recommended with a great variety of salads and meat. I particularly enjoyed Lime & Strawberry Caipirinha.

In next few hours, stay tuned for Charlie's session on JRuby and Brian's talk on NetBeans/Ruby tomorrow. You can always come and talk to me about GlassFish/JRuby - an "eco friendly" alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel at Sun booth. If not there, I'm sitting in back of the room :)

And we are also giving away 5 copies of Agile Web Development with Rails: 2nd Edition in sweepstakes tomorrow, right after Brian's talk.

The complete album is available at:

Follow the conference at twitter - acts_as_conf or IRC - #actsasconf.

Technorati: conf jruby ruby actsasconf rubyonrails glassfish netbeans