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Justin Gehtland, Relevance

Justin Gehtland

Justin Gehtland is President and co-founder of Relevance, Inc., a development, consulting and training organization based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He has written commercial applications in Ruby, Java, C#, VB, Perl and other languages, and is the author or co-author of eight different technical books, including "Pragmatic Ajax", "Rails for Java Developers", and the Jolt(tm) award winning "Better, Faster, Lighter Java". He is a well-traveled speaker, appearing at RailsConf, RubyConf, RailsEdge, JAOO, and the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour.

He is particularly proud to be involved in the continuing development of the Streamlined open source framework (streamlinedframework.org).

He currently lives in Durham, NC, with his wife, 2 kids, 2 dogs and 2 cats.

Presentation: "Ruby in the Enterprise - A Case Study"

Time: Monday 14:30 - 15:30

Location: SAS Nortvegia

Abstract:

Our company is framed around the following core beliefs:

  1. Always try to use the right tool for the right job
  2. Ruby provides our team greater productivity and effectiveness
  3. You don't have to be a genius to get the same productivity out of Ruby

We are going to walk through a the details of a real engagement we have with a large enterprise, building core features in Ruby and Rails. We'll examine the difference between the Ruby development process and their prior experience building the same features in Java, and we'll talk about the experience of bringing their internal development team up to speed with Ruby and Rails.

Along the way, we'll look at how we managed the codebase and the standard churn of an enterprise product and their effects on the codebase. We'll see rUnit and Selenium acceptance testing, and take a hard look at the project statistics and what they tell us about the suitability of Ruby and Rails in an enterprise setting.

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Presentation: "Ruby on Rails - ActionPack"

Time: Wednesday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: SAS Nortvegia

Abstract: Ruby on Rails provides a full-stack web development platform. Its two major portions are ActiveRecord, the OR/M system for data modeling, and ActionPack, which provides support for the Views and Controllers. During this talk, we'll get to see what sets ActionPack apart from more traditional MVC frameworks, and also what ideas survive intact. ActionPack uses "convention over configuration" instead of heaps of detailed XML to wire up the HTTP endpoints to eventual behavior and views, and provides several different routing strategies for managing the URL-space of your application. Its rendering engine uses a combination of script-in-a-template style (.rhtml) which is a direct .jsp equivalent, but also a more code-centric approach, called Builder. We'll look at how Helpers compare to tag libraries, and exactly how Rails integrates with JavaScript frameworks for Ajax applications. By the end of the talk, experienced Java web developers should be able to draw a mental map of features they are used to in their current frameworks to the features of Rails and be confident about trying Rails for the first (or second, or third) time.

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Presentation: "Panel: Enterprise Application Frameworks"

Time: Wednesday 16:00 - 17:00

Location: SAS Nortvegia

Abstract:

During the track we have seen all those technologies and frameworks - probably a lot of questions are left open and almost certainly new have arisen.

In this panel we will take the input from the audience and discuss Enterprise Frameworks in general. So this is your change to actively participate!