Just got back the The Rails Edge conference hosted by Pragmatic Studio in Denver Colorado.  All in all I’d say it was a great conference and an eye opener the direction ruby on rails is headed.

Some key items I walked away with are:

- Make use of the console. The ‘app’ is now accessible via the console and you can manipulate the web application directly from the console.  A very useful development / debugging technique.
- Power of metaprogramming.  Metaprogramming brings incredible power to ruby.. it is one of the foundations from which rails was built and is something you should understand to be effective in this environment.
- Use Capistrano for deploying rails apps
- Rake, rather the ruby form of ‘make’ can be used for many things.. even beyond ruby.  Heck you can even use rake to build and deploy java applications.  Use graphviz if you want to dynamically generate diagrams of your models!
- Use CRUD.  Fast becoming the preferred standard for restful applications.  Follow the conventions and your life will be alot easier!
- Streamlined is a great extension (soon to be a plugin) for building a quick ‘admin type’ interface for your site.  It provides much of the default functionality that enterprise administrative screens usually require.

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