Last week I spent three days at the Rails Edge conference. This was a great event for learning about the latest developments in Ruby on Rails and meeting with some of the leading folks from that community.

This three-day event was produced by Pragmatic Studio, which is sort of a sister company to Pragmatic Bookshelf that publishes several of the key Rails books. The lead presenters at the conference were Dave Thomas, coauthor of Agile Web Development with Rails as well as Programming Ruby, and Mike Clark, who is the producer of the event, an active Rails developer, coauthor of Agile Web Development with Rails, and author of Pragmatic Project Automation and other Java books. Other presenters included:

• Chad Fowler, author of Rails Recipies, coauthor of Programming Ruby, cofounder of Ruby Central
• James Duncan Davidson, perhaps best known as the author of Tomcat and an expert on deploying Rails apps
• Justin Gehtland and Stuart Halloway of Relevance LLC, consultants who have been very active in the Rails community and have a lot of experience deploying enterprise applications
• Marcel Molina, Jr. from 37Signals, who is part of the Rails core team
• Bruce Williams, a designer/developer working on a very large Rails application
• Jim Weirich, author of the Rake utility and an expert in Ruby programming

If the people in this room couldn’t answer your questions on Ruby on Rails, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who could. With the unusual format of single-track, one-hour presentations separated by half-hour breaks, there was plenty of time to talk with the speakers and the roughly 100 participants. Some of the talks were entirely understandable by relative newbies such as myself, while others were clearly aimed at folks with substantial experience building Rails applications and programming in Ruby.

This event was a striking contrast to the previous week’s Web 2.0 Summit. This was obviously a much smaller and much more technical event, but what struck me was the center of interest: the Web 2.0 Summit was about, first and foremost, money, whereas the Rails Edge event was about ideas and craftsmanship. Both were interesting, but they’re about as different as two events could be.

In talking with folks in the evening and during the breaks; many of them seemed to fall into one of two camps:

• People actively developing with Rails as a corporate employee or as a consultant
• People who are using Java at their day job and building a web app with Rails at night, hoping to get to the point where they can quit their day job

More than once, speakers and participants pointed out that building a web application in Java as a spare-time activity wasn’t very likely; the fact that Rails makes it so much easier, and more fun, is encouraging and enabling a lot of niche applications to be built, often as hobbies that might someday create meaningful revenue. While the folks at the Web 2.0 Summit were more likely to be involved with heavily funded, well-staffed efforts going after big wins, the Rails Edge revealed a variety of small, enthusiast-created apps with more modest ambitions (like ShowerinaBox). I’d bet this latter source could be just as important to the future of the Web as the big efforts.

If you missed this event and wish that you hadn’t, there’s another chance: it will be repeated in Reston, VA on January 25-27. You can register here.

If you’re early in your Rails learning, then I’d recommend the Rails Studio instead; I’m planning to attend this on February 12-14 in Bellevue, Washington. It’s also being offered in January in Minneapolis.