Friday, September 28, 2007

Ruby East - 28th September 2007

http://www.ruby-east.com/rubyeast/

Attended Ruby East on 28th September 2007. Ruby East is organized by Chariot Solutions.

There is an interesting story behind my attending Ruby-East. Recently I started visiting the NJ Java User group. In my first visit, there was a raffle for Ruby-East which was won by James Guistwite [jguistwite@gmail.com]. He was unable to attend the seminar so he passed his offer to me.

Personally I found it as an interesting experience. I am a newbie to Ruby. This seminar gave me an opportunity to learn and get up to speed with Ruby. I reviewed all basic concepts of Ruby using some tutorials in two days before the seminar. This gave me a foundation to attend the Track 2 of the seminar where some of the advanced concepts were covered.



Big Day



I started at sharp 6.00 A.M. from my home. The morning was little drizzly but the traffic was smooth. Reached the Penn State - Great Valley Campus exactly at 7.30 A.M. My opinion is it is always good to reach early than late. Registration process was fine. Did a quick break fast and headed to the Musser Auditorium. Grabbed a seat close to the podium. Turned on my laptop and got the Internet connection setup.



Track 1: 9.00 A.M. - 10 A.M. Keynote: Hal Fulton - TheFuture of Ruby.



http://rubyhacker.com/



Hal Fulton is a Wizard of Ruby in his own terms.



Here are the abstracts of his presentation:



It has been 14 years since the earliest beginnings of Ruby, and at least seven years since it was introduced to the US. The past history is interesting, but the future is more so. What changes can we expect to see in the language, in its environment, and in its community? No one has a crystal ball, but these are the opinions of one Ruby expert.



Hal talked about Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0. Ruby 1.9 is anticipated by Christmas 2007. During his talk he mentioned about Rubinius (http://rubini.us/) as the future version of Ruby.



Other interesting topics he talked about JRuby, Ruby.NET, Cardinal, YARV and Rubinius.



Groovy, Python and Peal 6 has borrowed many features from Ruby.



Some googling on Hal Fulton gave me interesting links:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/what-is-the-ruby-way