Track: Advanced Ruby and Rails

Abstract: *As Rails in its first few years did not primarily appeal to "enterprise" users, the enterprises now seem keen to reap the benefits Rails has to offer. This new generation of Rails applications will face other challenges than the first generation of Rails apps; not being able to do everything from scratch, having to integrate with enterprise middleware and legacy databases. How can Rails - and more importantly Ruby - offer the same elegant coding conventions, meta-programming and domain specific languages when Active Record is not an option?* In this talk I will present an approach to creating a DSL very much like Active Record in a project without a database. I will describe how we started off asserting our model classes were actually Active Record classes, writing the tests and discovering the API without worrying about how to implement it. And then I will give a few examples of how I found Ruby made it surprisingly easy to actually implement something like Active Record. I found that growing a DSL you'll love is all about ambition.