The RailsConf 2007 attracted 1,600 attendees in Portland from May 17th-20th. And if you read David’s loud thinking blog the conference was a great success in spite of more than huge number of participants. But after the conference is before the conference … so the conference marathon continues this year:

June 22nd 2007: Rails-Konferenz.de, Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.rails-konferenz.de/
Language: German

June 22nd – 23rd 2007: Ostrava on Rails, Ostrava, Czech Republic
http://ostrava.rails.cz/en/
Language: English

September 17th-19th 2007: RailsConf Europe, Berlin, Germany
http://www.railsconfeurope.com/
Organized by O’Reilly – Language: English

November 2007: Rails Hispana Conferencia, Madrid, Spain
http://www.conferenciarails.org/
Language: Spanish

Certainly there are more Rails conferences out there … so just drop a comment

It’s hard for the traditional fixed and mobile network operators - like the Deutsche Telekom - to cope with those innovative VoIP companies like Skype or Jajah, these days.
Right now, the Deutsche Telekom bought shares of the start-up Jajah via their venture capital subsidiary T-Venture, according to Financial Times Deutschland.
The two Austrians Daniel Mattes and Roman Scharf founded Jajah in 2005. The VoIP telephony service works without the need of any client software installation. You just have to leave your personal telephone number when registering your Jajah-account. You can even use your mobile phone number. Via the Jajah-website you type in the telephone number of the person you want to call. Some Seconds later, you’ll get a phone call from Jajah and the system connects you with the desired person. The VoIP call can be triggered from every Internet-connected Computer and even with your mobile phone with integrated web browser.
According to information provided by the company the average revenue per user per Mont his 6 Euro and the margin is 40%. At the end of the year Jajah wants to increase its customer base from 3 to 10 Million. That’s a bright earnings outlook for this start-up company!

Sources: Manager Magazin, Financial Times Deutschland

On May 23, the EU parliament voted fort he EU regulation to cap the charges for using mobile phones abroad after succeeding in tough negotiations with the national EU governments. Based on the initiative of Viviane Reding, the EU parliament really acted as the representation of the EU people and fighted for lower charges. In contrary, the national EU governments did not live up to their names as "representation of people": They tried to assert the interests of the mobile operators to establish the highest maximum charges possible. Read the rest of this entry »

The PDF-book of Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson has just been updated to Version 2007-5-6. It now covers the newest developments within the Rails development community. Especially the "observer" and "sessions" sections have been updated.
Although I can recommend the paper-version of the book … it’s really great for reading in the park … Dave and David really show with their PDF-version how to make innovative use of electronic books.
All standard e-books I bought before always made me angry afterwards: The rigid Acrobat-DRM treated my like a potential criminal. And the e-books had no extra features compared with the paper version - only the disadvantages of an e-book.
Dave and David used another approach with their second edition of "Agile Web Development with Rails": Read the rest of this entry »

It really get’s hot within the Rails developer community. Joyent, the creator of Rails-web-based collaboration applications from California, is developing Slingshot: By using Slingshot you can deploy Rails applications as stand-alone apps on Mac OS X or Windows. The Rails apps can be used without the browser and in an offline environment. Back online the stand-alone Slingshot application and the online server based app can be synchronized.
The project is in an early stage - although it proves again that the Ruby-on-Rails community is pure innovation in these days. Slingshot is another argument for elegant coding with Ruby-on-Rails.
By the way, also Adobe is trying to merge the Web online and the Desktop offline world with their Apollo project. However they do not use Ruby-on-Rails but their Flash programming environment Flex.

Sources & Picture: joyent.com, joyent-com/developers/slingshot, labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/