Have you ever struggled to understand a customers hand waving list of requirements?
Enter Cucumber, this is a new BDD tool which can alleviate the perennial issue of acceptance testing by helping tie down exactly what the customers requirements are.

Cucumber can be used to drive out behaviour for rails apps, ruby apps, java apps, flex apps, the list goes on.

Over and above demonstrating how Cucumber is used technically, I would like to share how you can use Cucumber as part of your agile development process and save money ( or make more money quicker ) as a result.

There are many ways to effectively take advantage of mobile technology that can help us build better Rails application tailored to portable devices. Find out why it’s important to go mobile and just how to do so.

Rails 2.3 now has engines and rack. So in time we should be able to write more and more reusable full-featured components/mini-apps that can be plug-n-played together.

Rails makes CRUD operations incredibly easy. Diverging from the standard, though, can be painful. Whether it's a 4-step wizard, or a form that allows you to signup and pay in one step, the last thing you want to do is put that logic in to your controller. In this talk, using examples taken from real projects, you'll learn to build elegant, testable, and RESTful complex forms.

You've quit your job. You've read the books. You've bought a mac. You've customized the colours on your Textmate install to look just like the original RoR screencast. Now what?

This presentation would talk you through the basics of starting up as a Rails contractor from personal (sometimes painful) experience. It'll cover such things as Finding Work, Tax, Choosing The Right Clients, How To Set Your Rates and When To Say No.

(I'm open to suggestions about what people would like to hear about!)

The process of taking your pails project and putting it live. What do you need to think about? How should you plan it? What happens next?

Introducing the <a href="http://ept.github.com/invoicing">Ruby Invoicing Gem</a>, a framework for easily dealing with accounting, tax, payment processing, maybe special discounts, reseller deals and more... all the boring stuff which you don't want to think about as a developer, but you need to get right if you want your app to scale with your commercial success.

The Invoicing Gem takes a staightforward, developer-friendly approach while internally having all the flexibility of a full accounting system.

I would like to suggest a session on commercial web apps in general, including a hands-on technical example of how to start billing users properly.

A look at other languages and frameworks that have great ideas that Rails can learn from.

Recipes for not-so-simple Sphinx usage, including facets, excepts, geo-searching, delta approaches and I18n.

I've been running Agile teams writing Rails apps using BDD for a couple of years now, with some very successful projects, a couple of failures, and one or two near failures, from which we've learnt some valuable lessons.

I'm thinking of something along the lines of:

* What works
* What doesn't
* How you can maximize chance of project success with Agile.

Advice on getting the most out of Ruby and Rails if you've come from a Java development background.

Agile development has been all the rage for a while now. Test driven, iterative development and placing a priority on real, working software, rather than complex requirements and documentation seems to make software projects run smoother and more effectively. But, why are these techniques so effective?

Understanding why agile works can help us better understand our software development process and even to come up with a decision framework to help us answer questions that agile doesn't.

cucumber-nagios takes the results of a Cucumber run and outputs them in the Nagios plugin format. Instead of simply checking whether your app is up, you can monitor your production app's behaviour.

cucumber-nagios also fits really well into your existing development agile processes, letting you take the Cucumber features you've already written for your app, and test your application once it's deployed.

I'd like to cover how to use it, what checks to write, and why monitoring is important!

What's the story, what will it do for me, and what are the dangers in migrating to it

Working on those web skills for your own gain and knowledge is all well and good, but how do you use them to help others? A discussion on the opportunities and challenges out there for developers to dive into and have a positive impact on other developers, local communities and beyond.