Joe O'Brien

Presentations

JRuby for Java Nerds

One of the best things to come out of the ruby community in the last couple years has been JRuby, the Java - Ruby bridge. It is clean, robust, and allows you to use a proven, fully-implemented language on the Java virtual machine.

This is a session designed to speak to the Java developer looking to explore Ruby a bit more. What tools can I use? Is there an IDE? How good is the integration? These questions and more will be answered while we walk through test-driving a Java class into existence, demonstrate hooking into a Rails application, and showing some of the common testing tools Java developers can harness.

JRuby for Ruby Geeks

One of the best things to come out of the ruby community in the last couple years has been JRuby, the Java - Ruby bridge. It is clean, robust, and allows you to use a proven, fully-implemented language on the Java virtual machine.

This is a session designed to show Ruby developers the power they can get from hooking into the JVM. Why would I want to do that? What tools are there for me? These questions and more will be answered while we walk through test-driving a Java class into existence, deploy a Rails application on a JEE server, and show some fun tools you can add to your open source arsenal.

Rails, Rack and Middleware

There has been a lot of talk about Rack in the Rails community, but little explanation of why its needed. Rack is an interface for web servers in ruby that allows us to glue multiple applications together in a very elegant manner.

This talk will walk through the basics of what Rack is, how you can modify your application to take advantage of it and then demonstrate creating a rack application from scratch that works with another application.

Testing Rails

Ruby on Rails was one of the first platforms to ship with a full testing harness. There are, however, some critical problems that can arise from doing straight out-of-the-box testing.

This talk will walk through some of those areas helping you avoid the pitfalls that many fall into. What do you change, what do you keep, how do you write maintainable tests that last the test of time? We will walk through all of these while test-driving an application.

Cucumber, testing and communication

Cucumber is a tool coming from the Ruby community that makes standard acceptance criteria executable. By turning the standard agile notation of Given, When, Then, into executable tests, we are essentially allowing business owners to communicate with developers through code. Come see how to use it, and real world examples of how it has been used in the wild.

This talk is part case study and part tutorial. Cucumber itself is extremely easy to learn, but the possibilities are numerous. We will demonstrate the tool itself and show how to turn your acceptance criteria into tests. We will then take a look at two very different projects and how cucumber was used to transform the project testing; one a green field rails project and the other, a large warehouse management system that integrated custom applications with vendor software.

Be Careful, Your Java is Showing

Have you ever opened up a Rails application and you can tell it was someone's first Rails app after coming in from the Java world? Are you new to Rails and have wondered where your IOC container is, or why you don't have any interfaces (and what's with all of these underscores) ?

This talk walks through many of the common pitfalls that people run into coming from the Java world. I begin with simple idiomatic issues (methods that end in a question mark, and underscores), to larger issues such as IOC containers and AOP programming. This talk is designed to dig into some of the deeper mental disconnect that many developers have when coming over to the Rails world.