Last weekend was the Ruby Hoedown at the Redhat offices in Raleigh, NC. All told, it was a great conference. I think the organizers did a great job, and gave us a conference worth much more than the $100 price tag. The chosen speakers provided a good balance of technical and philosophical talks, and the 150 attendees included some very bright and interesting people.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz opened the conference with a presentation on MERB. As he describes it, "a mongrel handler with built in controller and view templating with erb". For people that need more speed out of a Rails application, MERB could be a good option. I am not in that position right now. For me, the most interesting thing about Ezra's talk, was hearing some dissent from within the Rails camp. Although he is a big fan of Rails, Ezra feels that the Rails code is becoming too large and complex. With this in mind, Merb is designed with the goal of keeping the core code small, simple, and fast.

After many years of programming, I am keenly aware that there is no single solution to every problem. As much as I love Rails, I am glad to see that people are also trying other approaches. Having many different solutions available makes for a much better toolbox.

Next up was Jay Phillips who spoke about the Adhearsion software for developing VOIP applications. The Adhearsion software provides a set of Ruby wrappers around Asterisk. Once again, I was amazed at how a well written domain specific language (DSL) can simplify your life. The Adhearsion syntax is so simple and clear, that practically anyone can look at an Adhearsion script and have a pretty good idea what it is doing. This clarity is a vast improvement over the Asterisk syntax. Having never done PBX or VOIP work before, it looked like so much fun, I am going to have to give it a try.

The final talk of the first day was a keynote address by Bruce Tate. His talk was echoed the second day by Ken Auer. Both talks revolved around the idea of how to get Ruby to "cross the chasm" into mainstream adoption by industry. Bruce's talk centered on the history of Java, and how Ruby can avoid the pitfalls of that language. Ken's talk centered on the history of Smalltalk, and how to avoid the pitfalls there. Both talks provided a great deal to think about as we move forward. Since I had not followed Smalltalk much, I learned a lot about Smalltalk history that I did not know before.