Stuart and I were presenting at Rails Conf Europe last week in Berlin on a Rails plugin called Juggernaut which I’ve been working on for a few  years now. Juggernaut lets you do ‘Server Push‘, i.e. you can push data to the client from the server.

During the presentation we showed a live chat application, with a real-time presence list of connected users.

We also demoed a real time map application, where users could show where they had traveled from to visit the conference in Berlin.

You can find the demo code for both applications here and here respectively. You can also find a PDF of the presentation here.

One of the other presentations I really enjoyed was Security on Rails by Jonathan Weiss (presentation here). He approaches security from an attacker’s perspective, which was a really effective way of getting the presentation across.

All things considered, it was an interesting conference - now for the dConstruct writeup…