Impromptu Open Mic (Rails Security: Theory and Practice Cancelled)

Dan Moniz

The speaker is a no show. Aint that about a bitch.

Impromptu Open Mic (I love that you can have a talk cancel and have 20 people immediately ready to talk about something cool that they threw together over the last week. I just can’t get over the energy and ingenuity of this community):

Zed Shaw. Utu

Author of Mongrel. Talking about his new chat project utu which is a replacement for IRC. That is based on hate.

Adding Strong Identity, Reputation, and Retribution,.

The internet right now is like Detroit. The cops are worse than most of the criminals. Going for a Giulani style cleanup of the internet, but he’s not like Giulani.

Is there going to be redemption? If he can set it up so you can work off hate via charity. No love option to prevent bots.

Zed is a pretty amazin speaker.

Treetop

Nathan Sobo

Parser generator - basically parser based on regexes. Runs in linear time. Doesn’t require lexing.

Cool. Pretty clear to read. Easiest parser grammar to read i’ve ever seen.

GPL’d right now.

gembuilder

creates binary versions of gems. Will be on rubyforge soon.

ActiveWarehouse

Research on how to use DWARF algorithm to return answers really quickly. Tree data structure to handle multiple dimensions for tens of millions of rows. Implemented in ActiveWarehouse. What they found out is that Ruby is slow for computation and ActiveRecord::Base is slow, but ruby is so expressive it lets you right the algorithm easily.

embedded_actions plugin

Partials require that you load the data in eac controller that uses it. this plugin replaces partials with a full controller action/view that can be embedded into a page. Makes it easy to cache and invalidate caching.

Available soon at http://nycrb.rubyforge.com

Fuzed

Mongrel is awesome, but sort of a pain to deploy. Writing a system in ERLang that handles that whole stack.. As fast as Mongrel, but dynamically configurable. Been working on it for a week. They’re going to use Amnesia (distributed fault tolerant DB that comes with ERLang) that they’re going to use code.

Integration

This guy heard “we need to talk to ASP.Net and Java” He demos some code really easily talks to them over SOAP and it all worked fine. Rails uses multiple DBs connects to Salesforce.com via WS-*

assert_request plugin

Lets you assert the type of request in controller actions. If you get a request that doesn’t match. They use their functional tests to make sure that actions that they don’t want get bounced. Doesn’t require AR models.