RailsConf Europe 2006 was held in London in September, it was a good opportunity to meet some great minds, talk to the Rails Core Team and learn about a series of technical aspects about Ruby On Rails.

It was a blast, three days of non stop Ruby action and I’m not talking about the drinks after the conference. *wink* *wink*

Anyway, for those who enjoyed the talks or couldn’t attend the conference you’ll be happy to know that the podcasts for the talks are now available online from SkillsMatters inc (the lovely people who organized everything).

So, download away and check out the Flickr feed too.

WeBreakStuff won the first place for best user interface award at RailsDay 2006.

RailsDay 2006 was a 24 hour event in which anyone could participate with a team and create a web application in Rails, there were prizes and it was a great opportunity to show off your great skills in,well, whatever your keen at.

Anyway, WeBreakStuff is a Portuguese startup, composed off Frederico Oliveira, Tiago Macedo and Pedro Eduardo Lemos Freitas and they entered the competition with weRateStuff (original name!). In Fred’s words a “social review-anything web application”.

The interface was in fact simple and beautiful. The team is in the meantime working on Goplan (an online project-manager in Rails) and they also made a post about their recent victory, read it here.
You can also check out the reviews that fellow blogger Evan Weaver made of the rest of the participants in the competition, there were alot of different ideas and I guess everyone ended up gaining positive experiences from this event. See you guys next year.

Since I’ve started working on weSpendMoney I’ve been fiddling more and more with Ajax. It’s no suprise because since Google started using it in Gmail and Google Maps, the popularity among developers and companies skirocketed and besides, it gives me with the means to build a gui which provides a more user friendly experience and eliminate waiting times (or at least hide them).

The RubyOnRails framework already comes with the prototype library and several ajax helpers so it’s more easy for the developer to work it them and there’s also rjs templates which generates javascript using ruby code.

There’s a nice tutorial for beginners on this subject at RubyNoob!

But I’ve also gave Rico a try, it’s another open-source JavaScript library (there’s so many of them now) that provides full Ajax support, drag ‘n drop management, rounded corners (yay!) and some essential cinematic effects. I think it’s worth trying out and the examples are simple to understand, many books also have examples in Rico.

Of course with all these Ajax effects I needed some activity indicators, It’s a good thing I found out this page which has a nice gallery of them. Someone actually made a generator for this, very neat.

Finally, there’s a great site which has many tutorials, links, discussions and resources on the subject, go on hover to Ajax Lessons for some learning.