Pathfinder Development’s Noel Rappin Selected to Speak at RailsConf 2009 Conference

March 3, 2009 - PRLog -- Pathfinder Development, a leading user experience design and software development firm, is pleased to announce that Noel Rappin, Pathfinder’s Vice President of Rails Development and author of “Professional Ruby on Rails” from Wrox Press, has been selected to speak at RailsConf 2009, the premier conference for developers of Ruby on Rails.  RailsConf takes place in Las Vegas May 4-7, 2009.

Ruby on Rails, often referred to as Rails, is an open source web project that couples the Ruby programming language with a fully-featured web application framework.  It is ideally suited for creating customer-facing web applications and its growing popularity is due to its ability to speed development while enriching user experience.  

Rappin’s presentation "Below and Beneath TDD: Test Last Development and Other Real-World Test Patterns” will explore using Test Driven Development in less-than-ideal situations, and applying its rules to non-TDD processes in order to maximize benefits. Test Driven Development breaks up the development process into small chunks that can be tested immediately, saving the time and expense of a long testing process at the end of development. Because these chunks of code have been tested during development, the code is cleaner and easier to alter if changes are needed in the long term.

“Test-Driven Development is not always feasible for every development project. This session discusses how the principles of TDD can be used in situations that may not support a pure TDD effort,” said Rappin. "Even when it's not possible to use the pure TDD process, developers can use TDD principles to write code that's simple, functional and clean."

In addition to “Professional Ruby on Rails”, Noel Rappin is completing work on "Rails Test Prescriptions: Keeping your application healthy", a new e-book detailing comprehensive strategies and tools for testing Rails applications. The book will be available on Noel's website, www.RailsPrescriptions.com. Noel builds Rails applications for a variety of Pathfinder clients and is a regular contributor to Pathfinder's Agile Ajax blog.

About RailsConf 2009
RailsConf, co-produced by Ruby Central, Inc. and O'Reilly Media, Inc., is the largest official conference dedicated to everything Rails. The conference serves as an interactive meeting ground for the most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies. RailsConf provides attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web and Rails to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities. To learn more about RailsConf, visit http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009

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About Pathfinder Development
Pathfinder is a consulting firm specializing in software development and user experience design. Pathfinder delivers software applications that are easy to use, providing clients with the technology to enable business breakthroughs and competitive advantage. Pathfinder’s clients range from early stage start-ups to Fortune 5 companies across a wide array of industries, including energy, healthcare, insurance, financial services, media and publishing. For more information, visit http://www.pathf.com or call 312-372-1058.