Press releases

RailsConf Europe Tours Rails' Present Landscape and Drives into Future: Global Rails Community Returns to Berlin

Press release: July 29, 2008

Sebastopol, CA--Co-presenters O'Reilly Media and Ruby Central have unveiled the program for RailsConf Europe, the official trusted event for the Rails Community in Europe on 2-4 September, 2008, in Berlin, Germany. Organizers have extended early registration until 30 July, offering community members the chance to save up to £150.

"RailsConf Europe is in its third year, and like Rails itself, it's an established presence but one with energy and real freshness. This year we've added some more presentations to the schedule, and we've got a great lineup of keynote talks and sessions centering around the Rails core team and both the present and future of Rails," says program chair David Black. "The presentation schedule is packed with focused, technically informative talks from experts in everything from security to internationalization to deployment, metaprogramming, database and UI engineering--the whole range of Rails activity and interest. The Rails scene, like the Ruby scene, has always been vibrant and rich in Europe, and we're tapping right into it.

To meet the increasing demand for skill building, and to spread the joy of Rails to programmers and IT managers alike, RailsConf Europe 2008 will feature the most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies from across the continent and around the world, providing attendees with examples of development paradigms and design strategies.

Jeremy Kemper and Kent Beck have joined David Heinemeier Hansson as keynote speakers. The conference schedule has just added a special inaugural keynote to Tuesday evening: Hansson and members of the Rails Core Team in a discussion that will also respond to attendees' questions. More sessions scheduled for the remainder of the conference include:

  • "Design Patterns in Ruby" by Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks
  • "EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing" by Jonathan Dahl of Slantwise Design)
  • "Enterprise CRM on Rails: 700 Migrations and Still Counting" by Stefan Kaes of IT Consulting und Systemsoftwareentwicklung, David Anderson, and Larry Blatz of Folklogic.com
  • "Functional Testing Lessons Learned" by Jay Fields of Thoughtworks -"Genomes on Rails" by Matt Wood of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
  • "How Not to Build a Service" by Mike Perham of FiveRuns
  • "How the Global Open Source Census Works" by Rod Cope of OpenLogic, Inc.
  • "I can has updatez: Real Time Updates in Rails" by Richard Livsey and Martin Sadler of CitySafe
  • "Juggernaut: Realtime Rails" by Alex MacCaw of Reevoo and Bram Whillock of Quire, Inc.
  • "Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR" by Till Vollmer of MindMeister/Codemart GmbH
  • "Rails Powered by GlassFish & jMaki" by Arun Gupta of Sun Microsystems -"Rails Software Metrics" by Roderick van Domburg of Nedforce
  • "RESTful Everything: Towards a Complete Resource-Oriented Workflow" by Ingo Weiss of Metaversum GmbH
  • "Taming the Beast: Managing Complexity in Ajax Applications" by Dan Webb of danwebb.net
  • "The Future of I18n/L10n in Ruby on Rails" by Sven Ruchs of artweb design and Marko Seppa of BESTgroup Consulting & Software GmbH
  • "The One-Two Punch: jQuery with Rails" by Yehuda Katz of EngineYard
  • "Treading the Rails with Ruby Shoes" by Eleanor McHugh of Games with Brains and Romek Szczesniak of Spiky Black Cat Records
  • "When To Tell Your Kids About Presentation Caching" by Matthew Deiters of Independent

Another addition to this year's conference will be the Community Project Code Drive, an event introduced by program cochair Chad Fowler at RailsConf in Portland earlier this year. Project leaders and like-minded developers can spend the day hacking together, after project owners pitch their projects and attendees organize themselves into groups to work on those projects. In addition to this project, tutorials led by experts fill the conference's first day, Tuesday, 2 September.

Sponsors include Engine Yard, Sun Microsystems, ELC Technologies, and BrightBox.

Evening events feature the popular Birds of a Feather sessions. The members of the Berlin Ruby Usergroup also invite all conference attendees to Bratwurst on Rails, a welcoming party on 1 September.

A full-stack Ruby framework for building database-driven web sites, Ruby on Rails is increasingly becoming one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Rails is about productivity and programmer comfort. Rails is "opinionated," favoring "convention over configuration." Following its path is easy and yields results quickly, with minimal configuration and project start-up overhead. Because Rails projects come together quickly and are results-driven, Rails is gaining traction in the business community and is perceived as having business value.

For more conference information, please visit: http://www.railsconfeurope.com/

To register for the conference, please visit: https://en.oreilly.com/railseurope2008/public/register

To apply for a media pass, please visit: http://en.oreilly.com/railseurope2008/public/content/media

For complete information on the conference schedule, please visit: http://en.oreilly.com/railseurope2008/public/schedule/grid

To sign up for the Community Code Drive, please visit: http://wiki.oreillynet.com/railsconfeurope08/index.cgi?CommunityProjectCodeDrive

To see media coverage of RailsConf Europe 2008, please visit: http://en.oreilly.com/railseurope2008/public/content/news-coverage

To view presentation slides from RailsConf Europe 2007, please visit: http://www.railsconfeurope.com/pub/w/61/presentations.html

To see how the attendees summed up last year's RailsConf Europe, please visit: http://railsconfeurope.railsonwave.com/video/just-one-word

For exhibition and sponsorship opportunities, please email Yvonne Romaine: yromaine@oreilly.com

For media and promotional partner opportunities, please email mediapartners@oreilly.com

About Ruby Central
Ruby Central is the parent organization of the annual International Ruby and Rails Conferences and is a visible presence and point of contact for corporate sponsors interested in supporting these conferences and other Ruby activities. For more information, visit: www.rubycentral.org

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

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