No RailsConf this year

Last year I had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to attend the first RailsConf and had a great time. This year it's back with a much bigger venue and support from O'Reilly. Alas the timing is not so good as I'll be helping the folks at Savoy prepare for HMS Pinafore, but I'll be able to tune into many podcasts and whatnot. If you are thinking of attending and can't make up your mind I would thoroughly recommend attending RailsConf 2007. It'll give you a great op­por­tu­ni­ty to network with a great bunch of people who are highly skilled, yet open to newbies.

The second half of the year is open for con­fer­ences and the like so maybe OSCON would be fun. Microsoft are running their PDC, but I'm not sure I'd get as much from that as I have done previously. I'll have to have a think about it...

Tagged with rails and rubyonrails.

Running Rails with FastCGI on IIS

With a little help from Mike Volo­dark­sy's tutorial I'm up and running with Ruby­On­Rails using a native FastCGI im­ple­men­ta­tion. This is a big deal because it'll mean that Microsoft will provide a supported way of running Rails ap­pli­ca­tions. In addition, PHP ap­pli­ca­tions will be able to run with greater per­for­mance and re­li­a­bil­i­ty thanks to the work that Zend and other PHP devs have put into improving their Windows story.

This is a good job since I'm doing more work with these open source tech­nolo­gies at the moment since Microsoft have done little to improve the ASP.NET platform. For .NET developers, MonoRail is the only usable framework for de­vel­op­ment. Additions such as ASP.NET AJAX do little to make the platform better for the ap­pli­ca­tions I am working on. The problem with AJAX is that it's not an end in itself. You need to have a reason to use it and a design to match, or you end up on the road to poor per­for­mance and usability.

Tagged with iis, rails, ruby and rubyonrails.