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I'm Speaking at RailsConf 2009!

Posted by Alexander Dymo on April 08, 2009

Two important things made me busy lately. One is the preparation of the annual KDevelop Team Meeting which I'll write about later and another one is preparing for my RailsConf 2009 presentation called "Advanced Performance Optimization of Rails Applications".

I've been working professionally with Ruby and Rails for 3 years and always found it funny when my applications turned out to be slow. And when I say slow, I don't mean anything like I complained about in my previous posts on KDE performance.

The performance of normal Rails application is measured in seconds :) The performance of slow Rails application - in dozens of seconds. You simply can't write a KDE/C++ application that would be that slow.

But that doesn't mean your Rails application is doomed to be slow. Contrary to that, it can be snappy and feel more like a desktop application rather than like a slow web site. But you do need to know how to do that.

So, after all those years of fighting for performance I decided to tell the world on how to make Rails applications fast. If you're interested in the topic, please see my presentation abstract and other blog post for details.

Someday I believe we'll be optimizing Ruby applications in the KDE world as well ;) QtRuby and Korundum are the great frameworks. They have C++ code behind them so performance will never be as much of a problem as it is with Rails. And they make developers extremely productive. Once just out of curiosity I rewrote my Sublime UI library from KDevelop in Ruby and spent 3 days for that. C++ version took me 3 months (excluding the time I didn't work on it) and it's not even finished yet!

KDE as a project was always keen on using the best tools for the job. I hope one day we'll seriously pick up dynamic languages. I dare to imagine how that will boost the already robust and speedy KDE development ;)

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