I just got back from Berlin where I was in attendance representing Spongecell at RailsConf Europe. In addition to my great presentation I was inspired by Yehuda Katz’s presentation on jQuery and Justin Gehtland’s talk on loosely coupled applications. We have been using the Prototype library for a long time at Spongecell and although it has made improvements recently, I’d still like to try out jQuery some day.

Spongecell has worked on many products and although most of what we have is built off a single code base, we have built some applications that live off of our API. Gehtland spoke on ways to split an application into sub-applications, such as how sign-in credentials and databases can be shared to give seamless transition between parts. However, there are some limitations, such as memory. Rails takes a lot of space, and when you’re just launching an app, having each part load the rails stack could be significant cost.

RailsConf Europe was slightly smaller than what I’ve seen in Portland, but the food catered in Berlin was incredible and the presentations were definitely on-point. Feel free to check out the e-commerce example site I created and view the ActiveMerchant presentation.