Ruby continues to prove it's not the lonely child of enterprise development on the final day of InfoQ's QCon conference. The track has centered around the elegance of metaprogramming, with Dave Thomas providing an excellent overview of the concepts of meta programming, which introduced the ideas to a number of non-rubyists.
Coverage was great for Rubyists looking to expand their understanding too: James Adam's exploration of the Rails plugin architecture made hacking rails and integrating plugins much clearer, whilst Rich Kilmer's Domain Model Specifications provided some fantastic inspiration to solve specific niche language issues.
The comical highlight of the day came from Zed Shaw's exploration of the movement that is mongrel - with the aid of flickr and humorous anecdotes. As with all the talks today, my talk on scaling Rails was well attended, where I reviewed some of the tips useful to improving performance.
It was great to see Ruby share a platform with other enterprise-oriented tracks, supporting the language's growing maturity and strength within the global marketplace.