RailsWayCon 2009 day 1 part 1

After running late because of some trouble with the berlin railways. I've skipped the first RailsWayCon Session and attended to the Webinale Keynote Phänomen Web 2.0 with Ossi Urchs . The Talk was about Web 2.0 Basics and how the web has and will change buisness. It was nothing really new for me and most of the croud but a great summery of web 2.0 in general.

RailsWayCon Session: Show the Frontend some Love: HAML and SASS

Speaker: Jan Krutisch Jan gives a really nice talk about haml. Haml is a markup language that’s used to cleanly and simply describe the XHTML of any web document without the use of inline code. Accourding to Jan this are the pros on haml:

• no redundancy
• generates html nice code
• For css ids and classes syntax similar to css
• Filters to use textile, markdown, ...

An this are the cons:

• It's a Problem when you have to deal with designers
• Debugging is be harder in some cases

The other part of the session was about SASS which means Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets. The language comes with haml but can also used for it's own. It solves some problems with css. A weird thing with cascading style sheets is that they doesn't support real cascading. Sass solves this problem and also adds constants, calculations and imports.

RailsWayCon Session: The Pleasure and Pain of Migrating to jRuby

Speaker: Steven Bristol Steven gives an intersting talk about problems he run into when moving his application LessAccounting to jruby. He decided to move the jruby because he had to implement a third party api written in java. The first Problems he run into was that all compiling gems like ferret or file column doesn't work in jruby. So he had to replace this parts in his applications with other solutins. The biggest Problem he run into was the deployment of the application with glass fish. After get everything running he still has the problem that the deployment with glass fish is much slower than with mongrel before. His recomendation if somebody run into the same problem is don't move your whole app to jruby. Just build a small application which exposes a rest interface.