I went to the LogicaCMG Guru4pro session with Chad Fowler (Ruby & Rails evangalist, author) yesterday. It was a nice talk complete with obligatory Ruby-on-Rails-app-in-10mins demo but I couldn't help but wonder if the Logica suits with redyellow neckties where too happy with the anti-java/anti-enterprise angle of the talk. Guru4pro is a thinly disguised courting session for Java "J2EE" Ontwikkelaars/Architects/Software Engineers.

The subject of the talk was the (non)innovation of the RoR platform and one of the conclusions was be arrogant and lets face it:David Heinemeier Hansson is an arrogant bastard, why else would you build a MVC web platform in an obscure language like Ruby and tell the world how they should use it; how to name your tables, columns, controllers views and how your directory structure should look. And yes the plural of sheep is sheeps... RoR has basically one configurable item: the database access. The rest is default. This fits well of course with Enterprise software development...not.

Enterprise customer want standard services as long it is their standard. but it doesn't fit very well with the community thinking either in which freedom is paramount (often resulting in more options, features and ways of doing the same thing than you can wave an XML file at..)

it was an entertaining evening. And I got a free Rails Recipes book.

update by bert, mike is a guest blogger and friend and went to this event.