Dreamforce is crazy. So many sessions, so many people to see, so little time. Moreover, there were a bunch of sessions related to Ruby, and it wasn’t always easy to know what sort of content would be covered ahead of time (esp. since some of them were added at the last minute).

I will summarize here all of the sessions covering Heroku and Ruby along with what you should know about the status of Ruby right now in the enterprise world, then present a summary and evaluation of Dreamforce presentations as a whole. It’s worth mentioning that all of these are among the most popular sessions, both from impressions at Dreamforce and Youtube views afterwards.

From high-level to very technical:


Platform State of the Union
The Platform State of the Union is the one *must* attend event for all developers. Highlights were the vision for the future of the platform by Byron Sebastian (former CEO Heroku, now Senior Vice President of Platform Technology), from 2:01-6:30, an appearance by the creator of Ruby and now, employee at Heroku, Matz, 6:40 – 8:40, as well as an extensive example from Barry Newman of Saveology of utilization of Heroku and Force.com platforms 35:48 – 45:00, followed and preceded by comments by Dave Carroll, Director of Dev Evangelism for Salesforce.


Heroku in the Enterprise
Oren Teich, COO @ Heroku
Very visually compelling and enthusiastic presentation by Oren Teich that gives a good introduction to the Heroku platform. Appropriately emphasized the core strengths of Heroku,”You as a developer have complete control over what is going on in your app.” Didn’t quite connect the dots as far as what would be compelling use cases for existing Salesforce customers. Nonetheless, my favorite presentation at Dreamforce.


Connecting Ruby Apps with Force.com
Alex Sutherland (Mavens) and Joel Dietz (me!)
Originally slated to be a more technical presentation, ended up being a high-level presentation of the use cases for hybrid apps that leverage the strengths of using the right tool for the right job. Also gives the history of Ruby integrations from the folks with the most experience (mainly Alex). Presented some compelling use cases for Ruby/Heroku utilization (although Joel Dietz said “umm” too many times, esp. at the beginning).


Building and Deploying Great Applications with Salesforce, Ruby, and Heroku
Danny Burkes, Pivotal Labs
Presentation by lead developer on how to use the new Database.com gem released by Salesforce at Dreamforce (see my earlier post for some background on this).


Using Ruby on Heroku
Alex Wong, Salesforce.com
Starter presentation on how to get a Ruby on Rails app running on Heroku. Another presentation with similar content was given by Morten Bagai (but doesn’t seem to have made its way to youtube).


Connect your Clouds with Force.com
Jeff Douglas, Appirio
Attempting to do a bit of everything and generally succeeding is Jeff Douglas. See his high-level description at 3:55 and demo of a mobile device focusing on Heroku at 36:14.

In general, all of the bases were covered somewhere at Dreamforce. There were introductory sessions for Ruby the language, introductory sessions for how to employ Heroku, high-level introductory sessions to the platform, and a couple sessions that showed compelling use cases and showed the when and what is the right tool for the job. In general, the Heroku sessions set a new standard for compelling presentations, and I’m confident that things will continue to progress in this direction — despite the fact that some of us (::cough cough::), continue to be forced to use the standard Salesforce powerpoint template.


Another thing, and I am confident that this will be resolved in the next six months or so, is the lack of an unified and compelling vision for what is the right tool when. The increased investment in all parts of the platform is fantastic, but there is still a bit more to be done as far as connecting the dots with existing enterprise clients of Salesforce and Heroku.