Trackhost: James Cox, smokeclouds

James Cox has been developing and interacting with the web for the last six years, building apps small and big. Having worked on projects as diverse as editorially driven content management through e-commerce, he has a wide range of scenarios to draw from.

Having not only developed small projects, James has experience managing high scalability situations too. Starting with PHP's website, php.net, he spent many years managing the various services within the infrastructure team, learning the tricks of the trade and experimenting with new techniques.

Since, then James has solved the scalability and uptime issues of a major Mid-East online news source, a massively popular webzine serving over 10 million hits a day, and has helped twitter get started working on their problems. Within the community James has worked on testing new availability scenarios with other leading scalability evangelists and continues to research new ways to attain high performance webapps.

Presentation: "Introduction: The Rise of Ruby"

Track: The Rise of Ruby

Time: Friday 09:00 - 09:15

Location: Abbey Room

Abstract: The growth of acceptance and use of the Ruby language is nothing short of phenomenal. Developers have stopped asking "Why?" and are instead seeking to learn how to best take advantage of what Ruby has to offer. Meanwhile, Ruby on Rails is quickly maturing as it approaches version 2.0 and continues its march to dominance in web application development. Widespread adoption of REST principles are simply more fuel for Rails fire around the world. This track provides in-depth learning about programming innovations in Ruby and Rails, along with practical advice for organizations embracing Ruby as their development platform of choice

Presentation: "Panel: When is Rails an appropriate choice?"

Track: The Rise of Ruby

Time: Friday 16:00 - 17:00

Location: Abbey Room

Abstract: Rails has taken the development world by storm, being compared to Java in the skills parade of recent job adverts. But is Rails the right choice? This panel of experts will discuss the reasons for picking the framework over other platform options, exploring topics such as choosing the platform for prototyping, scalability and ease of management. Join us to get involved with the Q & A and decide for yourself if switching to Rails is the path for you.