Lightning talks are one of the more interesting parts of a conference in my opinion since 5 minutes really forces the speaker to get to the point and it becomes painfully obvious if the presentation has no focus or if there has been real work to get across the main message in the shortest amount of time.
So here are some highlights
Kuwata on Java to Ruby
- No, not the book Java to Ruby
- Going from Java to Ruby requires a change in mindset. Not a change of code
- Some historical example: COBOL in Java (ed. That sounds frightening) is like Java in Ruby
- Don’t hold back experts and too many things spend too much time on beginners
- Do not keep beginners as beginners (teach them!)
- Bragging about the largeness of a project size is the wrong type of bragging (suggested large code + many devs == lack of ability
dRuby & Security by Nishiyama
- druby is not built by default to handle the wild Internet
- There is a feature called insecure method list that will help prevent certain methods from being invocated remotely
- Use $SAFE however it won’t save against a DoS. Also don’t forget about rlimit
Ruby + ODE by Sasaki
- Showed a very nice 3D demo walkthrough world controlled with a Wii-mote and looked like the Pitagora Switch world
- Can summon objects pressing one of the buttons
- Can stop time
- The project should be on Code Repos
- (ed. Seeing this in action was far more interesting than reading these notes)
- Conclusion first: Sorry they don’t
- Showed some very nice examples of using the Enumerator library for many bad cases (each_slice)
- Beginning Ruby programmers really love each to the point of going overboard
Folk programming with Ruby by mootoh
- Folk Programming was introduced at YAPC Asia 2008 (See my notes)
- Show examples outside of building web applications such as Rich UI exploration
- Showed examples of Plugins to other programs since it’s easier than writing a big app (although with Ruby the apps should be nice and small)
- Some examples: Safari + Hatena bookmark, Quicksilver + Twitter (looks dangerous), Quartz Composer + Gainer, Vim + Refe
- Ruby is a very good glue
Again as a Rubyist… toRuby by Ikezawa
- (ed. I liked this talk a lot since it wasn’t by some uber-Ruby hacker)
- Didn’t use Ruby until 2000
- Background was as a consultant since 1984. Helped found a Wapro Kissaten!
- Moving to Ruby hit the OOP barrier. Was not used to OOP methodologies at all
- Stopped however after a long time in June 2007, found a local Ruby guru to help him out and that got the ball rolling again
- Invites others to join in
Ruby 1.9 with Rails 2.1 by matsuda
- Went through the history of web programming (or his version of it)
- Ancient History – PHP
- Recent History – DB Framework with ORM (in Java… lots of these frameworks)
- Current – Rails
- However DB access is a Rails weakness
- Introduced named_scope feature (Is this a Rails 2.1 specific feature? Need to review this myself
- More info on this at blog.dio.jp
Read code with Testing by Endoh
- Rookie Ruby Committed
- His suggestion on learning is by reading real code
- Use TBCR (Test Based Code Reading)
- Run make test-all
- Find code paths that are never executed
- Add tests (requires more code reading)
- Using this method have increased Ruby’s test coverage to 85%
- In contrast Python is 80%, Perl 63%, PHP is 51% (plans to target PHP next)
