The Vancouver Ruby/Rails/Merb Meetup group is putting on a free 1-day Ruby conference in Vancouver BC.  We're calling it "Ruby in the Rain" since it's Vancouver in late January.

The conference is happening at WorkSpace (Suite 400, 21 Water Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 1A1).

There will be a combination of planned talks and unconference style talks. All talks will be scheduled on the day of the conference.

Ruby in the Rain Conference Schedule

Based on the number of unconference presentations scheduled on the day of the conference, there will either be 1, 2 or 3 tracks, so there will be between 5 and 15 talks.

Schedule

9:30 ‐ 10:00 Registration & Coffee
10:00 ‐ 10:30 Welcome & Unconference Schedule Planning
10:30 ‐ 11:30 Presentation Slot #1
11:30 ‐ 12:30 Presentation Slot #2
12:30 ‐ 1:30 Lunch Break
1:30 ‐ 2:30 Presentation Slot #3
2:30 ‐ 3:30 Presentation Slot #4
3:30 ‐ 4:00 Coffee
4:00 ‐ 5:00 Presentation Slot #5

Planned Talks

Merb is Rails
Speaker: Brock Whitten
Last year Brock explained why Merb kicks ass in his “Off the Rails” talk. This last December, the Rails core team has come to agree. This year Brock Whitten will explain why Merb 2 will be Rails 3, what this means to Rails developers and how this will benefit the Ruby community on a whole. This will be a high‐level discussion about the philosophy that the Merb team brings to the popular Rails framework with lots of room for Q and A. For more details on the merger, see http://merbisrails.com.

Mobile app dev with Sinatra, XUI and PhoneGap
Speakers: Brian LeRoux & Brock Whitten & Rob Ellis
In this talk Brian will walk through building a web service with Sinatra, then creating a mobile web user interface to the service with XUI and finally deploying the application to an iPhone with PhoneGap. Colleagues Rob Ellis and Brock Whitten will be on hand to provide further detail. See: http://nitobi.com http://xuijs.com http://phonegap.com http://phonefighters.com

Sinatra, CouchDB and AIR: Making soup out of buzzwords, or a quick paced introduction to RestfulX
Speaker: Dima Berastau
In this talk, Dima will build a Sinatra app that talks to CouchDB and an AIR client that talks to Sinatra and then show CRUD + online/offline synchronization and undo/redo using the MIT‐licensed RestfulX framework.