Tim Bray Keynote:

Question to start: who are all you people?

A lot of the crowd works for startups, a similar group works for other companies, and a smaller group are consultants.

Most of the crowd came from Java, some from PHP, and fewer from PHP.

Thinks that Ruby is as important as Rails.

What is Sun doing with Ruby?

• Sun sent them a big old server box to the Ruby 2.0 team for their SVN box.
• Sponsoring conferences (this one for example) Equipping NetBeans with Ruby and Rails tooling.
• The example of NetBeans are really impressive. Check out Tor Norby’s blog
• Hired the JRuby guys. Charles comes up on stage to talk about JRuby.
• Bringing Cindi back on stage. Why is ThoughtWorks using JRuby? It might help you deploy it, but it will certainly help you sell it.

Hi, the answer is Java. What was the question? - Sun for the past 10 years

Trying to change the dialog. Sun is doing this to move Servers, OS, etc.

Identity management is an area that needs a lot of work. They are doing a Rails attachment for Sun Identity Sever.

Decisions that drive growth are not made by CIOs. It is the developers who have slip things in the backdoor that actually work. Any tech company needs to know what those people are thinking if they want to know where the market is going.

That’s why we love you? We’re greedy.

How do you make money off free?

1. Adoption - If people don’t use it, you can’t make money on it. Adoption is about removing friction. Dropping the payment step greatly reduces that friction.
2. Deployment - After they get it, they have to start using it. It is not until after this that users get value
3. Monetization at the point of value - Hypothesis is that no serious business will deploy a serious app without support. If you believe that then you want to remove all friction at the beginning of the process.

Talking about London trip served as Web 2.0 “ambassador” to big investment banks. CIO / Strategist groups see that structure of information dynamics are changing. Got some traction with those people.

Had a tougher sell to the tech people about their rails. His argument was that Rails isn’t going to run the world, but it is going to change the way that all existing frameworks are going to work. So much money at stake, their can’t ever be down.

Let’s assume that Rails succeeds beyond our wildest dreams. Everyone uses it. New problems.

Namely, Java will never go away. PHP willnever go away. COBOL will never go away. The network is the computer and the network is heterogenous so we need to work with interoperability.

One option is to run on the Java platform. MOst of what we sneer at when we sneer at Java is the Language. But the JVM is great, and there is a lot of good, well documented code. Ruby needs to improve its documentation. Security is a benefit. Wide collection of APIs. There is a huge community of people who use it. Wrote the APE in JRuby because there isn’t a Relax validator in Ruby but there is in Java.

The answer to integration is REST. In practical terms when you talk about doing REST you talk about doing the web style. Architecture of the WWW Volume One is a good place to learn.

He is really escited to see the new caching focus that David talked about.

ETags

Less than a quarter knows what they are.

The idea is that you can send a signature. So you send a digest and don’t necessarily have to pull the whole thing back. Rails doesn’t do ETags very well bc they recomopute the whole page, so it saves somoe bandwidth, but doesn’t save the CPU. To do better we’ll probably have to save the tags in the DB.

Atom Publishing Protocol

Atom is REST.

Atom is simple enough to go through in the next 15 minutes.

Slide detailing the process.

Interoperability is coming along.

Rails resource flavor is very similar to the Atom protocol. Dream of the Atom protocol is that Everything should have a PUblish button. Every email client, every spreadsheet, every phone, every camera, Everything.

Is REST all there is?

WS* 36 specs ~1,000 pages total. Thankfully crack’s are starting to appear in the future. WS* sucks, who doesn’t know this, But it won’t go away entirely because of WCF. Everyone needs to integrate with Microsoft, so you’re going to need to have support for it around.

Tooling is important. Advantages to IDE are incredibly important.

It is fair to call a language where you can’t write the standard libraries in that language to be a “toy language”

Conventional wisdom:
*Java performance, tooling

• PHP scaling, ease of use
• Rails - Time to marke maintainability

He argues that time to marke and maintainability are the two issues that really matter.