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

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": Mehr …

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/

As a web developer you are spoilt for choice: Which script language should you focus on? Which one suites best for your future projects? Which framework speeds up your development? Furthermore the development of the script language and the framework are often open source projects nowadays. Behind PHP the company Zend is also a key driver. So the question here is: Which open source project is developing best over time? Compared to the established solution PHP, the community around the Rails framework written in the script language Ruby is fast-paced. And Rails promises clear, structured, elegant and above all fast coding. What road to take? Mehr …

The UNIX foundation of Mac OS X and JAVA as a platform independent programming language show their advantages when you search for development tools on the Mac.
You better don’t look back to the times of Mac OS 7, 8 or 9 and the beginning of the web revolution: most of the time you had to deal with stone-age tools as a web developer on the Mac.
But, how can you setup a productive web development environment on the Mac, today? Which software supports the development of server- and database-based web applications? Mehr …