From Rails to Rack: Making Rails 3 a Better Ruby Citizen

Yehuda Katz

From Rails to Rack: Making Rails 3 a Better Ruby Citizen

Synopsis

Rails 3 is on its way, and Yehuda Katz is giving attendees a sneak peek! With the advent of the Rack spec and library, Ruby web frameworks can interact in unprecedented ways. Imagine a Rails application routing to a Sinatra application, or Merb-style exception pages that catch exceptions from Rails or Cloudkit. These are focal points of Rails 3 and Yehuda’s talk.

The idea is simple: create a tiny API for interaction between elements of a web application. Instead of requiring special mechanisms for tests, controller instantiation, or CSRF forgery protection, design apps as a collection of such elements strung together into a stack. As with Unix pipes, limiting the interaction between elements makes powerful combinations a snap.

Merb 0.9 was rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of Rack, and Rails has begun incorporating it as well. Rails 3 will make Rack a fundamental part of the framework.

Join Yehuda and talk about how this powerful idea is informing Rails 3, and how it will change the way you develop.

Biography

Yehuda Katz is currently employed by Engine Yard, and works full time as a Core Team Member on the Rails and Merb projects. He is the co-author of jQuery in Action and the upcoming Rails 3 in Action , and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on Rails and Merb, but also on other Ruby community projects, like Rubinius and Datamapper. And when the solution doesn't yet exist, he'll try his hand at creating one--as such, he's also created projects like Thor and DO.rb.