I’d never have guessed that the first time I’d visit Las Vegas, the gambling and the drinking, the shows and the shopping would be a minor thing, something that I’d squeeze in between what really mattered. But RailsConf 2009 had such a comprehensive and interesting program that this ended up being the case. From the casual networking at breakfast and lunch over packed keynotes and high-quality talks to late-night Birds Of a Feather sessions, RailsConf did give the attendants any reason to step out if the air-conditioned Hilton and into the sun and lights of the Strip.

We did that anyway, obviously, but mostly we were learning, tweeting, chatting, coding, emailing and taking notes at a conference where the wifi actually worked and power strips were easily available. I’m not going to reference all the talks that I went to here, but I have uploaded my notes here. Also, I’ve written a detailed summery of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote and a few select talks that I attended for RailsMagazine, but the free PDF-edition won’t be available for another two weeks now freely available for download … slides from all the presentations can be found here.

So what did I take away from RailsConf from the top of my head? The first that springs to mind, is that I got to try RubyMine, a new IDE for Ruby on Rails. At first glance this might look like another Aptana or Netbeans, but the Rails Envy guys gave a stunning demonstration of the power of this new IDE: From TextMate keymapping and navigation, over code completion and refactoring that actually works, to automatic diagramming of models and their relationships, this product looks like a real productivity booster. I’m going to try it out the minute I get home.

Rack kept popping up everywhere. Lots of talks on Rack and Rails Metal (which is really just a wrapper for a “raw” Rack handler), and now Rack suddenly doesn’t feel so scary anymore. It just a way to do cool things on a raw request and/or response without the (full) overhead of the Rails stack. JRuby was another popular topic, as well as clouds – how to deploy to server environment that will seamlessly scale with your needs.

I have been following IronRuby with great interest since the project was started 2-3 years ago, and I was a bit disappointed to hear that the .NET implementation of Ruby is still nowhere near completed. I asked Jimmy Schementi from the Microsoft IronRuby team what took them so long (to be honest, I was a bit rude, sorry Jimmy), and asked that things simply took time. He said that JRuby had been 6 years underway. The positive news, however, was that the IronRuby team is still very committed to making their implementation fully Ruby 1.8 compliant, and that are using Rails to measure their success against.

I’d love to tell you more, but my plane is leaving soon, so you will have to make do with my notes.

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