Jamis Buck gave a talk on Capistrano. Initially, this did not work terribly well — he focused on new features in Capistrano 1.2 and was already answering final questions when someone in the audience asked whether the time left might not be used to actually introduce it. It turned out almost half the audience didn’t know it at all. Jamis did a quick intro then, which, together with the related Q&As, was actually very good. There was a very funny moment when, during his online demo, he accidentally rm -rfed his Capistrano installation. Luckily, the same conference WiFi I’m using allowed him to restore from his Subversion repository.

Capistrano seems worth checking out for any project, not only Rails-based ones — I can easily imagine it being used in any of our J2EE projects.