The 1st day of RubyWorld Conference 2009 (Morning)

RubyWorld Conference 2009 was held at here.



I attended these sessions:

• Opening
  
  • speech: Matz
  • speech: Shimane Governor
  • speech: Matsue Mayor
• Creating innovation with IT
  
  • speaker: Norihiko Ishiguro
  • At the moment, embedded softwares are the only ones that Japan has international competitiveness in.
    • In this field, "Suri-Awase" manufacturing is still effective like in analog industries.
    • There are domestic standards to some extent, and need to bring them up to international standards.
  • Cloud computing
    • This has abilities to change the structure of Japanese IT industries drastically.
    • I concern that Japanese vendors can begin the competition of cloud computing and do that.
    • Data center of cloud computing consumes many electricity.
    • Matsue city has subsidy programs for the business location that halve the electricity charges, so this city may be suitable for data center.
  • Exploratory IT Human Resources Project (The MITOH Program)
  • SaaS for SMEs
  • "Regional Innovation Partnership" plan
    • At the moment, Japanese IT industries have been built as a pyramid structure that pinnacles vendors in Tokyo area.
    • In this structure, It's hard for regional vendors to meet local customers.
    • So this plan makes growth of regional vendors and announcement for local customers.
  • Ruby standardization
  • The Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum
    • Partnership in CJK(China, Japan, Korea).
    • Next forum will be held in 2009/10/19~2009/10/21 at Tokyo, with Matz and Linus
• Keynote Address: What is Ruby For?
  
  • speaker: Tim Bray
  • Ruby is my freind. So says the good aspects and ungood aspects.
  • Ruby is the tool to make programming happy.
  • I have been coming to Japan many times. But I come outside of Tokyo for the first time.
  • (Photos of Shinjiko lake, Matsue city centre and Matsue castle.)
  • Taken with my Pentax. I am a Pentax user for a longtime.
  • I have joined PDML.
  • I wrote a program that transfer PDML posts to my Twitter, with Ruby 1.9.
  • Ruby is suitable for such a program.
  • At past, Twitter had driven by Ruby on Rails.
    • But Ruby is not suitable for the scalable system.
    • So Twitter had been down oftenly.
  • At now, Twitter is driven by Scala.
  • As the language to build Web application, the open software is more desirable than the proprietary software.
    • e.g. Pubsubhubbub
  • Limits of Moore's Law.
  • Now is the muiti-core era.
    • If you want to speed up the program, at past, you had to wait until programming languages speeded up.
    • At now, You have to do concurrent programming by yourself.
  • Functional programming
    • Erlang
    • Haskell
    • Clojure
  • If you do functional programming with Java lanaguage...
    • just use java.lang.Thread class
      • difficult
      • occuring deadlock or race condition
    • use classes in java.util.concurrent package
      • easier
      • still occuring deadlock or race condition
  • If you can use GCD in Snow Leopard, still occuring deadlock or race condition.
  • Erlang prevents deadlock and race condition
    • Instead it's painful for dealing with characters and files.
    • An name starting with uppercase is immutable, and an name starting with lowecase is variable.
  • Functional programming in Ruby
    • Better Ruby through Functional Programming
    • Research for Ruby/JRuby concurrency by Sun and Tokyo Univ.
    • And Erlang never makes programming happy.
  • Storier DEMO
    • Run on the Android
    • Composition with geotag, Google Maps and GPS tracking
    • Java Program in 2,200 lines and 8 days
  • Ruby doesn't run on the Android
  • JRuby on Android is just started.
  • Concern for runnning ruby on Android
    • Android device is low spec.
    • We need to concern battery consumption of Android device.
  • I have talked about Ruby's ungood aspects.
  • From now, I will talk about Ruby's good aspects.
  • Raverly
    • SNS for Chrochet
    • The largest pure Ruby site
    • Built by 1 person
    • Ruby Enterprise Edition, Ruby on Rails 2.2, memcached, Tokyo Cabinet, Tokyo Tyrant
  • Good match for REST
    • Rack can make RESTful interface simple.
    • Sun Cloud API is also RESTful API implemented with Rack.
  • Almost all mobile devices connect to the Web.
  • If Ruby will run on mobile devices, Ruby empowers mobile device users.

N.B. These summaries may be imprecise.

It's noteworthy that there are many attendees in suit I have ever seen at conference of Ruby or other lightweight languages.
I was not in suit. Of course, speakers are not!