The evening event on the Thursday of RailsConf was a ‘Core Team Discussion’, featuring six members of the core team who’d made it to the conference.
I took a few notes of some of the questions and answers, so here’s what I’ve got:
- When would you advise against using Rails?
- If you’re doing an ‘Enterprise’ project that’s doomed to fail whatever you write it in, please don’t use Rails!
- Are you going to be working on performance improvements for Rails?
- Most of the time the performance is good enough. “It doesn’t matter.” Where we’re recognised areas that are bottlenecks we have made changes, for example the Routing rewrite.
- Will you make improvements for Accessibility?
- This isn’t something we’ve been looking at, but it is worth pursuing. Maybe the Simply Helpful idea will help by making HTML more consistent and correct.
But also screen readers are stuck in the past, and they need to make improvements as well.
- Will there be support for Internationalisation?
- That there are many different Internationalisation libraries shows that this is not really an infrastructure level issue. It could be made easier in places though, and UTF8 support should be easier.
Tobias didn’t think it was hard to write i18N in Shopify – they just wrote their own. - Were they worried that the Simply Helpful stuff shown earlier would lead to ‘DIV-itis’?
- We’re adding them because we need them. We don’t expect to use this stuff for every DIV in a page.
- What’s the security model for Active Resource?
- It will use HTTP auth over SSL by default, but will allow pluggable implementations.
- Which is more useful, Integration tests or Functional tests?
- They are for different purposes. Functional tests test a specific action. Integration tests test cross-cutting concerns like permissions, and stuff which relies on building up the session.
- Would Rails include HTTP Streaming support?
- [Some discussion about what this meant] Dojo style streaming would require lots of changes to applications. There is a “plugin called Juggernaut”:http://juggernaut.rubyforge.org/
After the question session, DHH was asked to finish off the presentation that he hadn’t had time for in the morning. It turned into quite a rant about “Vendoritis” and Entitlement. While I tend to agree with the arguments, I wasn’t very comfortable with the emotion and swearing behind it. How English?
