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Yehuda Katz (wycats)
4.03
Description:
With the announcement that Merb will be merging into Rails3, you might have some questions about what that means for the future of Rails. Yehuda, the lead developer of the Merb project (now a Rails core team member), will talk about the work he's doing to bring modularity, performance, and a public API to Rails. The first Rails3 beta is scheduled for May of this year, so you can be one of the first to get a peek into the work the new Rails team is doing.
He will cover the key elements that differentiated Merb from Rails, and talk about how, specifically, the integration will occur. This will include: -how some new Merb features have gotten an overhaul to fit in more cleanly with the Rails ecosystem -what internal changes needed to be made in order to support a more stable plugin API -how you will be able to leverage the new focus on modularity in your applications -what does "performance" mean and the plans for optimizing Rails
Yehuda will also provide insight into the rationale behind some of the most contentious decisions that had to be made during the merge planning.
Links: Website
Comments on this Talk
markmzyk,
22 Feb 11:19 PM
As a previous commenter said, Yehunda turned this into a history lesson more so than a talk on the merger of Rails and Merb, which was perfectly okay with me, because the history lesson was incredible and well delivered. It provided lots of insight into why Rails is the way it is (it was mostly the history of Rails, which is understandable, given how it has been around longer than Merb).
Yehunda did have some technical issues, as his video didn't play, but that didn't really detract from the talk. At the end, he took questions from the audience about the merger. It took a minute for the audience to ask questions, but Yehunda didn't really fill the empty time or have any insights of his own to offer unless he was asked a question. It would have been nice if he had more insight to offer on his own without questions to lead it.
Although it promised to be a talk about how Rails and Merb would merge, it turned out to be a history lesson in how Rails was written (back before it was Rails) and how ambitious Matz was looking to Ruby 1.9(.1) and Ruby 2 years before they were released. Although the talk was more history than issues behind the merge planning, I found it fascinating, having never heard just how young DHH was when he developed Rails.