This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Railsconf 2007 Opening Keynote Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Beholding 1600 people in the auditorium was truly awe-inspiring. I walked in to the opening keynote this morning as Chad Fowler was saying something about not being arrogant. Promising stuff. Chad and a noticeably excited Rich Kilmer introduced David to talk about Rails 2.0. A prominent Rubyist in the back of the room leaned over and told me "we're going to boo when he does a fuck you".

"He won't", I replied.

Rails 2.0 is not a beautiful unicorn, won't solve all your problems, and it is real. I think to myself, okay need to shoot for The Rails Way being about 2.0, perhaps even the first Rails 2.0 book? The timing might be perfect.

David's 9 things I love about Rails 2

1. Breakpoints are back AND drop-in debugging is now supported! The debugging console pops up right in the Mongrel process. Looks really good and powerful. David says, "Kent Sibilev deserves a world of thanks for getting this to work.
2. HTTP performance improvements. The _include_tags now have a :cache=>true option that combines JS and CSS files together and gzips them to drastically improve performance.
3. ActiveRecord QueryCache. Caches queries that have already been executed for performance boost.
4. Renderers and mime types not conflated in the naming of the view templates anymore. (Refers to the new .erb and .builder extensions)
5. Better config and initializer directory structure cleans up the mess of environment.rb
6. Sexy migrations! Big improvement in the syntax of migration files and an example of a 3rd party plugin making it into core very quickly.
7. Much better HTTP authentication support baked in.
8. MIT license assumed now. Plugin generator script adds the MIT license by default.
9. Spring cleaning. Improvements to basic Rails code and lots of 1.2 deprecations being moved out completely now.