Sessions at RailsConf 2012 about Ruby on Rails on Monday 23rd April

New Relic CEO Lewis Cirne will lead a panel discussion with representatives from some of today's most popular, highly-trafficked web sites. With millions of uniques a month, find out how these organizations are optimizing their Rails-based sites for mobile, for unexpected traffic bursts, and for seasonality.

Do you need to start learning Ruby on Rails? In this morning tutorial the Envy Labs team will lead you through all five labs of their Rails for Zombies course. Unlike other tutorials, all you need to start coding Rails is a laptop with Wi-Fi and a browser which isn’t Internet Explorer. All coding will be done through our web application, and there will be plenty of lab assistants to help you if you get stuck along the way. Before you come to the course we recommend you play through http://www.tryruby.org/. It’s an in-browser Ruby tutorial.

Topics Covered:

• Basic ActiveRecord CRUD
• Models, Validations, has_many, belongs_to
• Views, ERB, Loops
• Controllers, before filter
• Basic Routing

Backbone.js is a flexible, lightweight tool for structuring the JavaScript in a modern web application. It goes great with Rails! But beware - "flexible and lightweight" are code words for "you build your own plumbing." Backbone is new enough that we haven't established strong patterns for that plumbing yet, so different Backbone codebases look very different, and when you're new to the idea of structuring your JavaScript, it can be tough to tell where the win is.

So in this talk I'll demystify Backbone. I'll show several very different ways I've used it on real Rails apps. You'll get a feel for the circumstances when Backbone makes sense, and moreover, when each of the different approaches to Backbone make sense.

It is no secret that location has become ubiquitous. Mobile GPS, available data sets, and easy-to-use mapping services have brought geospatial information within reach of web developers. Location already plays a significant role in many of the major services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, not to mention legions of startups.

However, for those of us implementing more than the most trivial features, it is also true that location is challenging. A significant learning curve awaits us, involving spatial databases, coordinate systems, interchange formats, and plenty of math. Our Ruby-based tools lag a bit behind those available to our Java- and Python-oriented colleagues, and effective documentation is scarce.

This presentation aims to jump-start Rails developers hoping to go beyond putting a few pushpins on a Google Map. Rather than spending a lot of time explaining the many concepts involved, we'll bypass the learning curve and jump straight into walking through code for a few nontrivial applications. The hope is that the conceptual knowledge will come naturally as a result of seeing it in action, but pointers to online resources will also be provided to fill in any gaps.

A thorough understanding of Ruby, Rails, ActiveRecord, and SQL will be assumed. No prior knowledge of GIS or computational geometry will be required, though it may be helpful.

Many people know that machine learning techniques can facilitate learning from, and adapting to, noisy, real-world data, but aren't sure how to begin using them. Starting with two real-world examples, we will introduce you to some libraries that bring machine learning techniques to your Rails applications. We will then dive into the art of feature design, one of the first practical roadblocks that many people encounter when applying machine learning. Feature design is the challenging, subtle, and often trail-and-error process of selecting and transforming the data you provide for your learning algorithm, and it is often the hardest part of using these techniques. Our goal is for you to come out of this talk with the tools necessary to think about machine learning and how to apply it to your problems.

This talk covers a successful utilization of Rails Engines to share features that cut across the layers of MVC in different Rails 3 projects. Rails Engines thus provide the best of both worlds: improved productivity by reusing MVC code (including assets like Javascript, CSS, and Images) and better flexibility by allowing different applications to customize behavior as needed without reliance on application-dependent conditionals. Rails Engine patterns will be provided to guide developers on how to leverage Rails Engines' reusability and flexibility without sacrificing maintainability.

Outline:

• Basics of Rails Engines
• Rails Engine Patterns
• Improved Productivity Tips
• Summary of Benefits and Trade-Offs

Attendees should walk away with an overview of Rails Engines and guidelines on how to utilize them effectively.

RoR makes an excellent framework for off-the-beaten-path type of projects, like hacking Roombas and other robots. In this presentation, I'll demonstrate how our soon to be robot overlords will be happy when we gift them with RoR and a connection to the internet. The presentation will include working examples and demonstrations of:

• communicating with an Arduino chip via Ruby
• tethered serial and wireless bluetooth control of a Roomba via Ruby and Arduino
• two-way communication with our robot friends over the web using Ruby on Rails and popular web services
• useful applications of robots controlled over the web
• 3 RoRoR pitfalls to watch-out for
• live performance of "Chiron Beta Prime" by Jonathan Coulton*

The presentation will close with an argument for why hacking on fun, often eccentric, projects in your spare time is essential for staying motivated, habitual improvement, and tangential learning -- i.e., being a real pragmatic programmer.

*not included, perhaps

Curious how Spiceworks, a social business app built on Rails, keeps 2 million active users happy? With Ruby on Rails, baby! In the last year our usage has increased 8x and now exceeds 200 million requests per month. Join Francis Sullivan, CTO and Co-founder, and David Babbitt, Technical Program Manager, to hear about the architecture and best practices we adopted to make this happen.

Get the ins-and-outs on:

• Hosting a high volume Rails application
• Choosing what to optimize
• Lessons learned while moving to JRuby
• Updating a large codebase through Rails beta to Rails 3
• Scaling the dev organization

Have you ever wondered what makes Rails tick? Bryan Liles will cover two of the pillars of the Rails foundation: ActiveSupport and ActiveModel. Together we will discover where some of Rails’ ease and power originates and how make use of it in your projects.

StillAlive.com was born from the 48 hour intense 2010 Rails Rumble and has grown! Having recently passed our 50,000,000th site result, this talk discusses the real world challenges and optimisations required to take a code base born from the fires of YAGNI to a production system.

This talk isn't about how you can scale from 0 requests to 500 billion requests per microsecond, but give a practical view to some of the performance problems we faced as the application steadily grew from a hack job into a functioning system.

The journey will go through the mistakes we made, challenges faced and real world optimisations discovered, including some tricks we learnt along the way from concurrent index creation to using the ZeroMQ messaging framework with Rails

With more than a million user submitted recipes and an active user base of 15 million monthly unique users, cookpad.com is the world's largest recipe website, and an essential tool for the 50% of all Japanese women in their 20's and 30's who use the site regularly.

The Cookpad.com service is built on Rails and is running entirely on AWS in Tokyo, where more than 30 engineers are working in small agile teams to bring more value to users every day.

As you know, Japan had a huge earthquake and tsunami last year, and some of those affected didn't have cooking facilities, water or basic foods for long time. Many Cookpad users immediately uploaded simple recipes that could be made without the basics in adverse conditions, and helped those in hardship immensely allowing them to enjoy food with their families at that difficult time.

In this session, I'll talk about the COOKPAD way of creating services and the technologies behind them, and how we improve peoples lives through cooking every day.

Based on Chapter 4 of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, “Rails-flavored Ruby” covers the aspects of the Ruby programming language most important for developing Rails applications. Topics include hashes, arrays, and other objects; blocks; functions; and classes.

As more people collaborate on the web with your applications, its not enough to just persist data to the database; it needs to be pushed out to your users web browsers so that they're always working with the freshest data.

In this session, Brad will show how to build a real-time layer on top of an existing Rails application's authorization and resource logic so that you can build on top of the hard work already invested in your Rails application.

Topics that will be discussed include:

• Why I didn't choose Socket.IO
• Stream application resources into Backbone.js models to keep data fresh
• Hook into ActiveRecord to push representations of data into a message queue
• Message queue naming conventions public/private resource streams
• Exposing message queues to HTTP
• Securing streams with existing application authorization logic
• Considerations for streaming in a production environment

Working with Rails often means switching between several Ruby versions back and forth which is made almost seamless by RVM. It also involves several simple command line tools like Pry, Guard, and Pow and that will make your development life so much easier.

Rails makes it very easy to rapidly develop web applications, but doesn’t always make it so simple to deploy or secure them.

This talk is going to focus on best practices to secure your rails application, learnt through multiple high profile projects and penetration tests. The talk will be practical and show that this isn’t necessarily hard if thought about from the start.

We’ll also touch on getting the right balance of security without it getting in the way of the users.