Ruby and Rails conference update

The preparations for Ruby and Rails 2007 in Amsterdam are progressing quite well. We are proud to have Dr. Nic fly in to give a presentation. Also the rest of the conference is already well filled with many speakers. Mind you, the official announcement has not been done yet!

We are only searching for more people that want to present a quickie. A quickie is a presentation of 5 minutes sharp. You could use it for example to show some cool stuff. So if you are around in June, and you made something new, or saw a nice new feature somewhere, feel free to e-mail us at danny at rubyenrails dot nl.

Update 2007-04-23: Unfortunately Simon Willison canceled. He felt too much out of place on a Ruby and Rails conference.

Turmoil in Wicket land

The impossible task faced by the Wicket team is finally coming to an end. For months and months work was done on 2 branches (1.3 and 2.0), with a third in maintenance mode (1.2). Three branches is realy too much for a group of volunteers. For the uninitiated: the 1.3 and 2.0 branches differ in one major big way: 2.0 has one extra argument to each and every component. Another large difference is that 2.0 supports generic models. For the rest, most new features and fixes were added to both 1.3 and 2.0.

So what are the options? It seems that the 'constructor change' will be dropped. This means that the 2.0 branch will be abandoned. All other 2.0 only features will be ported to 1.3. Users that use the 2.0 beta code from svn will have to migrate to 1.3.

Is this good news? I think so! If this turns out to be true, the excellent work of the Wicketeers will be much more focused again. Furthermore, all the good new features will be available for Wicket users of all branches!

Update 2007-03-19 And yes, it did turn out to be true:

I think it is time to close the vote and count our blessings. [...]

7 +1 binding votes, [...] 4 abstainees, and no non-binding votes.

This wraps it: we will drop the constructor change and migrate all features of trunk to branch 1.x in 2 releases: everything non-Java 5 goes into 1.3 and java 5 specifics into 1.4

Martijn

Vooraankondiging Ruby En Rails 2007 (Dutch)

Binnenkort is het weer zover. Een nieuwe Ruby En Rails dag. Vorig jaar was het een zeer geslaagde, zonnige en gezellige dag waar veel Rails en Ruby enthousiastelingen aanwezig waren.

Ook voor dit jaar zijn we bezig om weer een dag te organiseren. Er wordt druk gezocht naar een lokatie (waarschijnlijk Amsterdam) en we zijn aan het inventariseren welke sprekers uitgenodigd worden. Waarschijnlijk zal het allemaal plaatsvinden op 31 mei, maar het is 7 juni geworden.

Heb je zelf nog goede ideeën of verzoeken m.b.t. sprekers op deze dag, surf dan naar Ruby en Rails en laat iets achter in de comments. Je kunt ook een e-mail sturen naar danny at rubyenrails.nl.

We zijn op zoek naar sprekers voor:

• Presentaties van 45-50 minuten;
• Lightning Quickies™ van 5-15 minuten.

Mogelijke onderwerpen:

• Handige Ruby libraries (gems)
• Rails plugins
• Interessante real-world toepassingen van Rails
• Tips & truuks, leuke vondsten, enzovoorts

Update 2007-03-20 De datum is intussen vast gezet op 7 juni. Ruby en Rails 2007 wordt gehouden in het gebouw van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam nabij het Amstel station.

Mule patch accepted

Another product that accepted my patch. Till today I was proud to have patches in the following products:
- Xml2Db (specification for an aspect of the API, no code, long time ago)
- Struts (something with generating session ids, not long ago enough)
- Wicket (MixedUrlEncoding, other patches pending)
- Spring (a small documentation error)

Today this is extended with: - Mule (MailMessageAdapter potentially adds "null" string)

These were all small things, but I am still proud I was able to move open source further :)

For the future: I wrote a Camping application to manage a virtual e-mail domain for Postfix. My plan is to convert this to a Radiant extension and make it available under the MIT license.

Wicket to the recue!

My previous site (for the municipality of Amsterdam) is barely finished, and I have already convinced my next client (where I work as a consultant) that Wicket is more suited for them then Spring MVC. Life is sweet! Spring MVC has a lot of Spring quality, but the programming model is just not what I want to work with. Wicket to the rescue!