Looking back into an extremely successful year 2007 with 1,600 participants at the RailsConf 2007 and 800 participants at the RailsConf Europe 2007, the year 2008 will be the year of the Rails-2.0 conferences.

April 4th/5th 2008: ScotlandOnRails, Edinburgh, Scotland
http://scotlandonrails.com
conference language: English

May 29th – June 1st 2008: RailsConf 2008, Portland, Oregon, USA
http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/
organized by O’Reilly – conference language: English

June 9th/10th 2008: Rails-Konferenz.de, Frankfurt, Germany
http://www.rails-konferenz.de
conference language: German

June 10th 2008: Ruby en Rails 2008, Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://2008.rubyenrails.nl
conference language: Dutch

September 2nd-4th 2008: RailsConf Europe, Berlin, Germany
http://en.oreilly.com/railseurope2008/
organized by O’Reilly – conference language: English

There are probably a lot more conferences focussing on Rails … just drop a comment so the list can grow

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 Mehr …

Amazing news from John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the Venture Capital company which invested into start-ups like Amazon, Sun or Google: KPCB starts a $100M investment initiative called iFund, to fund “market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform”.
2750 Sand Hill Road, Melon Park CA is the place to be for all developers with great ideas for the iPhone and iPod touch mobile internet

It’s gonna be an exiting event on March 6th: Apple is inviting for a “iPhone Software Roadmap” event on March 6th 2008 in Cupertino. Releasing the long awaited release of the software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone is one thing. But it looks like there is one more thing – at least The invitation Apple is sending out points out a very interesting new focus of iPhone applications: The enterprise market. When you think back to the times of Apple Newton Message pad, enterprise applications where the unique selling proposition – so maybe UPS, Fedex and DHL will use iPhone for tracking parcels in the future … just an idea

So, let’s wait and see what’s Steve is revealing on March 6th.

Sources: fscklog.com, fortune.cnn.com, Image courtesy of Apple.

Besides the well known top dogs in the mobile world, like Nokia and SonyEricsson we had one of the newcomers in our video walk through, yesterday. But that newcomer Garnim did not need to step to far from his core business as they are big in the GPS-handheld-device market. So it’s not a big issue for the mobile industry to classify their market entry.
Google, on the other hand, is not predictable in many dimensions: Open platforms, like the mobile OS called android, they are developing within the Open Handset Alliance, will be released as open source in the future. The mobile network operator smiled at open source projects in the past – or ignored them. Sometimes they even worked against these projects. The control over the (mostly subsidized) handsets should be in the hands of the operator. With android, everything should change and users should gain control over their own phone – like they did with their personal computer. That threatens the operators who are afraid of dropping SMS and speech telephony revenues because of VoIP and IM-clients on the new open handsets. But there is a chance of generating new forms of revenues.
At the MWC Google and the CPU manufacturer ARM give a first impression in the look and feel of the new android user interface. Here is an android Video of a reference design phone. It is powered by an ARM processor and is quite fast in user interaction. The asianmanufacturer E28 just used android as his chance and ported android on one of it’s handsets for the Congress. Here also: quite fast screen animation speed.
As Apple’s iPhone, also android will really change the mobile world

P.S. Deadline for the android Developer Challenge of Google awarding 10 Mio. $ in total is: April 14th 2008