Stalking Neal Ford

Brian Dillard, Monday, November 19, 2007 @ 12:10 pm

For the second year in a row at the Chicago No Fluff Just Stuff conference, I was blown away by Neal Ford. An application architect and "meme wrangler" for ThoughtWorks, Ford is a conference-circuit regular with a conversational speaking style lots of smart stuff to share. About half of his talks this weekend in Itasca tackled such technical topics as service-oriented architecture, domain-specific languages and Ruby/Groovy/jRuby. The other half addressed more general developer concerns: strategies for improving your code and, more importantly, your productivity. (He even wore a Lifehacker T-shirt while espousing the joys of Quicksilver and Launchy.) I checked out several other speakers this weekend, many of them very good. For the most part, though, I just followed Neal from session to session, knowing I'd get my (employer's) money's worth.

My colleague John McCaffrey recommended NFJS in an Agile Ajax post a few weeks ago, and after my second trip I couldn't agree more. NFJS attracts an audience composed almost entirely of Java programmers. As a client-side Ajax/JavaScript guy, I could have been bored silly when I attended for the first time last year. Instead, I got turned on to Rails, learned a lot about SOA and vowed to become a regular attendee.

As for this year's conference, my big discoveries were jRuby, DSLs, and the Google Web Toolkit. (I'll post tomorrow about David Geary's GWT two-parter.)
Neal's session on "Building DSLs in Static and Dynamic Languages" provided an excellent overview of the topic while also including tons of specific examples in Java and Ruby. The take-home was that Ruby and other dynamic languages are way more suitable for DSLs, which quickly got me excited about the DSL possibilities of JavaScript. I'm sure I'll return to that topic in a future post.

Neal's conference slides are password-protected, but I recommend checking out these DSL resources:

• Neal's website.
• His blog, Meme Agora.
• His post "Ruby Matters: Frameworks, DSLs, and Dietzler's Rule."
• His post "Martin and Me and DSLs."
• Simon Willison's post on JavaScript and DSLs.
• The site for JetBrains MPS, a meta-programming system you can use to create external DSLs.

Neal's back-to-back talks on jRuby, too, were packed with good information. I hope I'm not the only person who mistakenly thought jRuby was a Groovy competitor rather than a Java interpreter for native Ruby code. Disabused of this notion, I spent most of Neal's talk being reminded of what a cool opportunity Ruby, jRuby and Rails present for JavaScript programmers. A lot of the session focused on the hurdles Java programmers will face when tackling their first Ruby project. But all of those scary, dynamic-language gotchas are second nature to JavaScript folks. For my entire career, I've always done just enough server-side programming to be able to deploy my client-side solutions. Rails offers me the opportunity to do so in a language that's much closer in spirit to the one I already use.

Technorati Tags

• SOA
• domain specific language
• Ruby
• Rails
• jRuby
• JavaScript

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4. The Rails Edge: Quotes and Notes
5. Developer’s Notebook: Useful OO JavaScript resources

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1. 

   I attended all of Neal’s presentation at NFJS Greater Toronto and I have to agree with you. Neal really know how to get his point across and he really have lots of smart stuff to talk about.

   Comment by Erick Dovale, Tuesday, November 20, 2007 @ 9:06 pm

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