So it’s a little late notice, but in a little less than a month I’ll be in Buenos Aires for a couple of days, speaking at Locos por Rails. The program looks excellent (with Yehuda Katz, Obie Fernandez, Fabio Akita, and more!), and I’m really excited for my first visit to South America to be Jorge Luis Borges‘ hometown.
I’ll be giving a version of my talk from Developer Day, entitled “Page Caching Resurrected.” Here’s the abstract:
Over the past year, Rails has gradually (and sometimes quietly) introduced some dramatic new changes. The most obvious of these is the Merb merger, but one of the most important steps on the path to Rails 3.0 was the introduction of Rack support. The effects of that change are wide-ranging, and are often surprising — and include the possibility for new architectures that were impractical or impossible before. Specifically, it is now feasible to build a complex Rails application that can still respond extremely quickly and directly to a specific set of requests, such as those an AJAX service might experience.
In this session, we’ll explore in depth how this strategy reinvigorates a useful, but formerly limited, capability of Rails: page caching. Of the three caching methods built into Rails, page caching is by far the most efficient, but it is also the least flexible. By making use of the Rack support in Rails (with tools like Rails Metal and simple Rack applications), page caching will come into its own as a viable strategy.