The Strange Loop 2011 conference was held in St. Louis this past Sunday-Tuesday. It was a really fun event, and I learned about lots of not-necesssarily-ruby stuff. It was nice to mix things up a little. Alex Miller did a great job with the event. It was well organized, had plenty of video coverage, and excellent speakers. Gerald Sussman blew my mind with crazy math and then said he wasn't really a mathematician, and Erik Meijer opened my eyes to coSQL.

From the Strange Loop website,

Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow's technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, mobile development, and the web.

So, instead of talking about the TorqueBox server as a whole, it seemed a little more appropriate to talk specifically about our work with DataMapper on Infinispan. In 2.x we're exposing the Infninispan cache a bit more than we did in 1.x, and as part of that, we've written an adapter for the DataMapper ORM that allows you to use Infinispan as your scalable and replicated backend data store.

The slides discuss how we leap-frogged around the two languages, Java and JRuby with a dash of metaprogramming along the way; and how we tied a Ruby-based ORM to a distributed Java key-value store in-container. Also included in the download is the source code for the simple Beer Catalogue application I demonstrated at the end of the presentation on Tuesday. And lastly, during Monday's catered lunch (thanks Splunk and Partek!) I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about TorqueBox. Those slides are included too.

You can download the slides, code and other detritus from github.

If you don't want to bother downloading all of that, just check out the slides from the DataMapper on Infinispan presentation here.