RailsCamp is an excellent opportunity to meet up with some of the best developers in the Oceania region. This camp featured 130 attendees, mainly from Australia but with a few from places like Ireland and California. The weekend featured everything from zombies to 3AM coding sessions on a projector. Individuals came for a variety of reasons from catching up with friends or getting in some serious coding time to learning more about rails in a setting with a higher density of really good developers than is likely to be seen anywhere else.

RailsCamp (an un-conference focussed on Ruby on Rails and associated stuff)  is an excellent opportunity to meet up with some of the best developers in the Oceania region. This camp featured 130 attendees, mainly from Australia but with a few from places like Ireland and California. The weekend featured everything from zombies to 3AM coding sessions on a projector. Individuals came for a variety of reasons from catching up with friends or getting in some serious coding time to learning more about rails in a setting with a higher density of really good developers than is likely to be seen anywhere else.

I spent most of my time listening to talks that a room and an amphitheatre had been dedicated to, although the amphitheatre was alternately taken away by Rock Band and rather more rain than was expected. Talks ranged from showing off new things people had built to in-depth live coding sessions on the projector to demonstrate a particular technique.

One of the most noticeable trends in recent open source Rails-related development has been the use of Rack as a platform for various applications and plugins. Rack is the middleware that sits betweens an app and the server. Rails itself recently started using rack as its middleware which has lead to a distinct increase in the number of features being developed as Rack based systems so that they are easier to drop into multiple different environments. Having functions provided as rack apps allows you to add bits of functionality or useful handlers to the application easily without having to integrate them as heavily with the Rails environment as you might a plugin or gem.

Rack apps can have many types of functionality from drop in debugging tools that wrap the calls that get sent to Rails to drop in authentication systems. RailsCamp featured demonstrations of Pancake, a stack system for Rack and Warden, an authentication system. Warden has already seen reasonable integration with a number of applications and been used for authenticating with everything from PHP based forum software to Microsoft’s Active Directory.

There was a large amount of discussion regarding best practices in developing software. From a number of sessions on testing to a talk on static code analysis tools. There is now a large suite of tools available for Ruby to perform static analysis of various important qualities in qualities. From cyclomatic complexity to discovering unnecessary code duplication tools like Flog, Flay, Reek and Roodi are now very good at discovering problems or potential problem areas in code. By keeping track of code complexity and keeping it down in initial builds maintenance costs will go down. Adding some static code analysis tools to your standard coding practices should be seriously considered for the purposes of creating maintainable code.

RailsCamp is a great event and the organisers are to be congratulated, any Rails developer in reasonable flying distance should consider attending. Sitting around with a bunch of active open source contributors is a great way to see where development focus is likely to be moving over the next while. And the techniques that they use are likely to be worth paying particular attention to. The code in the various public sessions was all of a very high standard, clean, and extremely well tested.

There should be another post coming shortly with some focus on testing practices.

Breccan is a developer at 3months.