- Presenters: Nico Mommaerts & Nathalie Tang
- Type: Presentation
- Duration: 2x60 minutes
- Audience: People who don't believe the hype, people who don't know Rails. Developers, team leaders, project leaders, etc are all welcome.
Abstract
Rails is a newcomer in the web framework space but has already gained an unsurpassed following in the last year. Part of the reason of this is the agile mindset from which Rails was born, and the use of Ruby, a language which lends itself excellently for agile development. Most of the attention arose because of the outrageous claims made by its author and his fanatical followers.
Rails is billed as an 'Agile' web framework. What's so agile about it? Do the claims stand up to reality?
The presenters have developed an application using Rails and want to share and discuss their experience with session participants.
Benefits of attending
- See through the hype! Is Rails really as effective as promised? Is it agile?
- Learn about another way of developing web applications.
- Learn a bit about the Ruby language.
- Pick up agile techniques for use in your own projects.
- Benefit from the mistakes we made.
What will the organisers learn
- Other opinions from different backgrounds about the Rails framework.
- Learn of similar agile techniques with less agile languages.
- Questions and doubts people who are unfamiliar with Rails will epxress.
Session Outline
- 60 min: See through the Rails hype!
- Short introduction to Rails & the 'agile' in Agile Web Development with Rails
- We will talk about our experiences with a real Rails project, one that affects all Xp Day participants! We will talk about the difficulties we encountered and the things that went really well in the entire development cycle of the application, from planning the application to deploying it. We encourage participants to ask any questions and voice concerns they have about using Rails.
- 60 min: Experience the Rails hype! Volunteers from the audience can
- Change some features in the application we developed
- Add new features to the application
- Create a (small) new application
Both session halves are semi-independent: if you just want an overview of Rails, come to the first part. If you already know a bit about Rails and want to exchange experiences, come to the second part. If you want the whole story, the good, the bad and the ugly, attend the whole session.