RubyConf China: NoSQL, Rails, and Matz on Ruby 2.0

Posted by Xuefeng Ding on Jul 04, 2010

Sections

Operations & Infrastructure,

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

Ruby on Rails ,

Ruby ,

MongoDB ,

Distributed Document Oriented Database ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Languages ,

NoSQL ,

Data Access ,

Database Design ,

Programming ,

Database ,

Ruby1.9 ,

TokyoCabinet ,

Rails

RubyConf China is an annual conference about the Ruby programming language. The 2nd RubyConf China took place in Shanghai, China, on the 26th of June. Ruby creator "Matz"  delivered the keynote, followed by many talks on current Ruby topics, most from speakers from Asia.  

This was Matz's second trip to RubyConf China, and his talk was about the Ruby community. Matz thinks it's very lucky for Ruby to have a great community. What's the definition of a "nice" community?

def nice
  brave &&
  passionate &&
  honest &&
  respective
end

Matz also mentioned that people can contribute to the Ruby community in many ways: by fixing bugs, publishing gems or even committing code to the Ruby core codebase.

When being asked about Ruby 2.0, Matz said that Ruby 2.0 would be an addition to 1.9 instead of a revolutionary upgrade. Ruby 2.0 will focus on scalability, improve the experience of team collaboration, especially big teams. Besides, in his talk, he mentioned the various implementations of Ruby such as JRuby and Rubinius.

Then, Yottaa's Jared Rosoff shared their experience on MongoDB - how to build a highly scalable system with Ruby and MongoDB. He showed the advantages and disadvantages of different SQL solutions, and explained why they chose MongoDB.

In the afternoon, WenTien Chang (a.k.a. ihower) showed 10 useful tricks. In the talk "Designing Beautiful Ruby APIs", he had many examples showing how to write beautiful APIs. In his opinion, an beautiful API should be:

Readable: easy to understand
Efficient: easy to write
Flexible: easy to extend

Meanwhile, he also introduced the Ruby community in Taiwan and mentioned RubyConf Taiwan 2010 held this April.

In "Ruby, NoSQL and Tokyo Cabinet", SNDA's BiaoWei Zhuang brought their work to RubyConf China - a NoSQL database based on Tokyo Cabinet named TCDatabase and its ActiveRecord adapter tcdb-adapter. By using TCDatabase and tcdb-adapter, developers can migrate their relational database to NoSQL database easily (even seamlessly). Zhuang made a demonstration and provided the roadmap of TCDatabase. It will be opensourced in the near future.

There were some other talks unmentioned above:

• Richard Huang - Ruby Application Based on HTTP
• Quake Wang - Ruby as a Glue Language
• Andy Hu - Build High-Quality Web Application on Rails 
• Shunichi Arai - Business Matters in after-Rails World
• Kouichirou Eto - Introducing "Patterns, Wiki and XP"

All the slides and videos will be available on the official site, http://rubyconfchina.org , soon.

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