Day 2 started with a talk by Jeremy Kemper about some of the new features of Rails 2.1, and also about some of the efforts of the core team to do cleanup in Rails. At the end of his talk, he announced the release of Rails 2.1 today. Although I won’t go into an exhaustive look at it, this was some of the highlights:

• better Timezone support – config.time_zone
• nice new rake tasks: rake db:create, rake db:rollback
• better built-in support for memcache-client
• gem dependencies
• improved migrations (no more 001, it’s datetime stamp based)
• named scopes
• dirty flag on attributes
• partial updates
• smarter :include

I’m sure there’s much more, but that was the gist of it.

After that, I went to a talk by Aaron Batallion about ESI. The information in the talk was really excellent, and it left me wanting to build a site using mongrel-esi/memcached and using FragmentFu. Basically, ESI is a way of doing caching, but unlike something like page caching, ESI can be done on a component by component basis. Very cool stuff. Aaron used it at Revolution Health which I tracked closely while I was at Eons.

I was really disappointed the talks last year about REST, and I was really hoping Ben Scofield would change my mind this year at his “Advanced” RESTful Rails. Unfortunately, a fair bit of the talk was used to explain what the term REST is, and references to Roy Fielding’s dissertation. There was a bit of code, but nothing that I would consider too advanced. Please don’t explain REST in an "advanced "RESTful talk with less than an hour of time.

I spent most of the afternoon listen to people tell me how to test/specs. Dan Manges and Zak Tamsen gave an interesting talk about testing, and had a few interesting tidbits (such as DeepTest), unit_record, and some other things.

After that, I listened to David Chelimsky talk about RSpec’s story runner, and his talk was really excellent. I left really wanting to use RSpec story runner (although I think it’s syntax is a bit too complicated and verbose).

The Keynote of the night was by Kent Beck, who is really an amazing individual. It’s hard not to respect his technical contributions, but I was also impressed at the breadth of interesting things he knew about, and his thoughtful responses to questions. He told three great stories that, in a non-boasting manner reminded us of some of the great ideas that we use today, such as TDD/BDD, Agile/XP, and testing in general.

There was a short update by Chad Fowler that mentioned that the most popular sessions of the conference will be re-created tomorrow, in case people missed them. I’m hoping to make it to Chris Wanstrath’s and Yehuda Katz’s talk, as I missed them the first time.