Hello everybody. Tuesday morning brought a boat load of Rails goodness to us here in Berlin. DHH, as usual, gave a great keynote and took questions. Nick Sieger has a great writeup about it on his blog.

It was hard to decide which morning session to attend, however my choice was Making Rails More (Artificially) Intelligent. The focus here was using Bayesian networks, a Ruby classifier, and genetic algorithms, to solve common challenges such as how best to optimize ad revenue on a site and routing emails to the appropriate department. Check below for links to a variety of gems that make this unbelievably simple (have I said how much I love Ruby today?).

• Presentation materials – http://bee.com.es/
• Bayesian Networks for Ruby – http://bn4r.rubyforge.org/
• General Genetic Algorithms for Ruby – http://gga4r.rubyforge.org/
• Ruby Classifier – http://classifier.rubyforge.org/

The second session of the day was 3rd Partying Issues and Solutions, by Ryan Garver, CTO of ELC Technologies. ELC heavily uses 3rd party applications such as BaseCamp, Trac, Salesforce.com, and Google Apps. The challenges that Ryan addressed were tying these disparate applications together using their APIs to present a single dashboard interface with a single sign on, and potential hazards such as timeouts and unavailability. ELC is about to release a Rails plugin called “synchronize_it” that will the rest of us integrate multiple 3rd party applications into a single Rails app. Stay tuned for that one.

Update: Casper Fabricius has a great overview of the DHH keynote as well. Read it on his blog: http://casperfabricius.com/blog/2007/09/18/railsconf2007-dhh/

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