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 …

Apple starts a series of tutorials on Rails 2.0 development on Mac OS X Leopard. A great introduction in the elegant web developer platform on the Mac. And great to see, that now also Apple starts to promote the open source framework actively.

At Mozilla.org the brand new betaversion of the open source browser Firefox is ready for download and test. The new Proto-theme of the Mac OS X version is one of the palpable changes: The theme is quite stable now and it’s a visually step to a Mac OS X 10.5 user interface. In bright contrast to the bad habit of web 2.0 applications which encourage users to use the all-time-beta apps in productive purpose, Firefox should be explicitly not used in productive environments. It’s also not suited for that because many of the plugins are not ported to Firefox 3, yet.
So, it’s really all about testing … and everybody is invited and encouraged to join the Firefox beta 3 bug hunt … and report them at Bugzilla.

It’s quite interesting to go into the browser / OS marketshare statistics Net Applications is gathering.
Within the last 12 months, the marketshare of Apple Mac OS X powered computers increased from 6.38% in Feb 2007 to 7.57% in Jan 2008 – a growth rate of about 19%. This great news for the Mac community – but what’s really surprising is the significant marketshare of iPhone surfers in the last month. The iPhone was introduced to the US market on June 29th 2007 – and in Jan 2008 it’s internet surfer worldwide market share is 0.13% according to the Net Applications. Focussing only on the US market it’s share is even higher at 0.20%!
It looks like the iPhone really fuels the use of mobile internet.

Source: Net Applications