As advertized, Tim Bray gave a keynote presentation at CANHEIT 2007 earlier today (May 29, 2007). And even though I would not describe Bray as an overly dynamic speaker, he certainly did suceed in being entertaining, educating, engaging and thought provoking.

Hopefully, Bray’s presentation will be made available online.

Until it is, you may find the following data points of interest:

• Bray spoke very highly of RAILS – RAILS in general, and Ruby on RAILS in particular. As a better way of doing things, he suggested that RAILS might even change the way you think about programming. To whet everyone’s appetite, Bray itemized two of RAILS’ principles:
  • Don’t repeat yourself
  • Emphasize convention over configuration

To substantiate his zeal for RAILS, he shared an example of a project that took four months to develop in J2EE; the same project was developed in five days with RAILS! The momentum behind RAILS is also quantified by book sales and attendance levels (in excess of 1,000) at a recent event.

• Bray also spoke very highly of REST – Even as a Sun employee, Bray was compelled to state that REST may eclipse Java/J2EE in the not-too-distant future. Of course, like many, he suggested that the RESTful approach has already eclipsed Web services. He even shared an image of the WS-DeathStar (Source: Unknown).

• Bray is contributing to the Atom Project – “Atom is a simple way to read and write information on the web, allowing you to easily keep track of more sites in less time, and to seamlessly share your words and ideas by publishing to the web.” Looks interesting!
• Bray made use of Apple’s Keynote presentation software – After seeing how Bray and Al Gore made use of Keynote, I broker down and licensed a copy of the software. In both cases, I was struck by the elegant simplicity of their presentations. After all, the purpose of presentations is to communicate. More on Keynote some other time I expect …
• Bray blogs at http://www.tbray.org/ongoing – Worth reading!