Update: some more presentations have been added to the conference site, most notably DHH’s keynote, titled “A peak at Rails 2.0”. (I’m not sure if he intended this as a pun or if he really means “peek”, not “peak”.)

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Portland at RailsConf. It was an impressive crowd—1600 people, triple the size of last year’s conference.

I found the conference uneven, as most are. There were occasional great talks, a few awful talks, and lots inbetween. The technical level also varied wildly, from introductory to the truly obscure. (I wasn’t able to make the first day of the conference, because of a big school event my daughter was in—kids come first. Some of the highlights were clearly on that first day: DHH’s keynote, and Ze Frank’s talk.)

My favorite talk, in part because it was at the right level for me in and in part because they were well prepared and presented well, was The Rails Way keynote by Rails core team members Michael Koziarsky and Jamis Buck. Their site is a great resource as well, showing how to refactor and rethink your code to make it better.

Some bloggers who took much better notes than I did:

• Daniel Wanja
• Nick Sieger
• John Nunemaker

Presentation Slides

The O’Reilly conference wiki has links to many of the presentations. I hope more appear there soon. Here’s some especially valuable ones that are online now:

• Harnessing Capistrano
• Rails Routing Roundup
• When V is for Vexing (DRYing up your Views)
• Building and Working with Static Sites in Rails
• Xen and the Art of Rails Deployment

For a visual take on the event, there’s lots of photos on flickr. For the best shots of the presenters, check out James Duncan Davidson’s wonderful photography.

IDEs Galore

There was a small exhibit area, with hosting services and IDEs in abundance. Despite an ongoing “real men use TextMate and the console” attitude among many of the Rails faithful, there’s tremendous effort being put into Rails IDEs, and there’s an abundance of alternatives:

• Aptana, which is integrating RadRails
• Sun’s Netbeans, which came from the Java world but now supports Ruby and Rails
• Borland’s CodeGear, which now has a Ruby on Rails beta version
• ActiveState’s Komodo

All are available for download in at least a beta state. Aptana and Netbeans are open source, while CodeGear and Komodo are commercial products.

I’ve moved from RadRails to Aptana and am reasonably happy with it. Each of the others has some nice advantages, but for now I’d rather spend my time writing code and doing business investigations than changing tools.

Incredible Momentum and Brainpower

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, this event left me with little doubt that there is tremendous momentum behind Rails, and an amazing number of really smart people working very hard to keep making it better and better. There’s almost 9,000 people subscribed to the rubyonrails-talk list, which gets hundreds of postings a day. And this is a friendly, welcoming community with a heart and a sense of humor.

All in all, it leaves me more convinced than ever that this is the platform to ride.