Pratik Naik from the Rails core team just published the announcement for a new Ruby on Rails hackfest: The person with the most patches merged into the core at the end of the month wins. In August, O’Reilly will handout a free pass to the RailsConf Europe. Keep on coding!

From Sept. 2nd to Sept. 4th 2008 the Ruby on Rails community will meet at the RailsConf Europe. It’s the third RailsConf in Europe and it will located in Berlin/Germany again. Last year, more than 800 Rails enthusiasts joined the conference - a great developer community event - and always the chance to drink your coffee besides one of the creative minds of the Rails Core team There is nothing that can replace the face-to-face communication within the community. So, I can warmly recommend joining the conference in Berlin to every Rails developer who is able to get there. And all those, who want to develop elegant web applications and do not work with Ruby on Rails yet - they should join us more than ever.
But there is an other group I miss a lot on Ruby on Rails conferences: Designers. Why? Because great application and interaction design and good web-application usability can only be achieved if developers and designers work closely together. That is why developers need to know something about design and designers need to know something about development.

So, I’m really happy that my  proposal, focussing on that issue, was accepted at the conference. In my double role as a designer and developer I’ll talk about

DESIGN ON RAILS FOR USABILITY … Or why designers should start to understand code and developers should start to sketch and use design methods.

I’m really glad be a part of the conferece in September - and to meet all these interesting people - and hopefully some codedifferent-blogreaders, too And please don’t forget to join Bratwurst-on-Rails on the evening before the conference starts.

The berlin Ruby User Group put their shoulders to the wheel for the Ruby-on-Rails-community: At the Kalkscheune, nearby the conference location of the RailsConf Europe 2008 they invite all Ruby-on-Rails-freaks to a socializing and networking event.

Last year it was a great and fun event - you’ll finde some pictures at Flickr. A great developer community shoud know how to party - and there is one thing I know for shure: Yes, we can

So, for all Ruby-on-Rails enthusiasts, who are in Berlin on the first of September – one day before the RailsConf Europe starts: Sign up for Bratwurst-on-Rails! See you there!

By now: Warm thanks in advance to the Ruby User Group Berlin for organizing this event!

From June 9 to 13 it’s all about the Mac and iPhone developer community in San Francisco under the warm sun of California: At the Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference the whole hardware and software developer community is gathering to get and exchange Mac and iPhone first-hand insights.
The company is running a scholarship program for students developing for Macs and mobile iPhone and iPod-touch devices. This year, 400 students will get scholarships to enter the conference for free (a US $ 1,595 value). But coming to California has to be arranged by the student him- or herself.
Application deadline is April 10, 2008 at 5:00 PM PDT - so, if you are a student and want to join the conference, apply now.

Source: development.apple.com

Zend Framework reached Version 1.5 since the last article about Zend or Rails. Ruby on Rails also did a big step towards version 2 – 2.0.2, too be precise
So, who is my personal winner in this race? Which framework suits best for fast and innovative web application development?
To say things first: My personal favorite is Ruby-on-Rails!

But the burning questions is: Why!

1. Ruby instead of PHP: At first it sounds rather loose to cold-shoulder the sweat and tears of learning PHP – and dig deeply into a quite young and a pure object oriented language. But everybody I talked to in the last months who came from Java or PHP just told me the same story: It’s no big deal to learn Ruby – and the benefits are overwhelming. Ruby enables you to write elegant, readable and easy to maintain code.
2. Vision-Driven-Community: No matter where you get in contact with the Rails community – at a developers conference or in a mailing-list: The basic mood and vision of the community is friendly, catching, international and productive. It’s all about creating something new, something better and more elegant with the power of the community … take a look at the RailsConf 2007 keynote of David Heinemeier Hansson in Portland.
3. Scalability: By now, there are several examples of high scaling web applications with rails. The only con of Rails applications compared to Zend framework apps is the need of a little bit more hardware. But the pros are worth it: faster development and easier maintenance. Twitter, Qype and Xing show it. Especially, the Twitter developers love to twitter about scalability, like Britt Selvitelle auf der RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin.
4. REST: Version 2.0 is a big step towards the principle of Representational state transfer. Now REST is deeply implemented into the Ruby on Rails framework. This makes it easy to create consistent interfaces to other systems. REST was nearly buried in oblivion but it’s a sophisticated and strong feature based on the http protocol. Find out more by the free PDF-book of b-simple focusing on RESTful-Rails.
5. Database-Migrations: Rails offers a powerful script based tool to create and redo database structures called migrations. For projects following the principles of “pragmatic programming” this is a perfect tool to create and improve the whole database schema and fill tables with data. Zend want to have a feature like that, too. There is a proposal for that feature – but nobody knows when this will be implemented and how it will function.
6. Test-Driven-Development: Rails still is one of the leaders in TDD by it’s built in creation of test infrastruktur for automated unit- tests, functional tests and integration tests. Zend Framework tries to catch up with its ZFTestManager – but a conclusive integration into the framework is still missing.
7. MultiView: Within Rails, content can be presented in different ways according to the type of request. You easily can create different views to show the data as a CSV file, an RSS feed, a classical HTML page or as a special iPhone page. SlashDotDash shows, how easy it is to create a special iPhone optimized user interface for a rails app.

But there are some specific projects, which are not well suited for Rails Read the rest of this entry »