I’m having an experience similar to one I had 5-6 years ago when I first starting tinkering with XML, this feeling of ‘woah – this is going to change how I do everything!’ What’s causing it? Ruby on Rails, this completely awesome framework for building web apps. I first starting looking into it after reading through some of the stuff about the development of instiki, the excellent wiki engine I linked to a few weeks ago. It turns out that the development of instiki inspired the work that became Ruby on Rails. Anyone building web apps would be well served to do a little reading on RoR. I’d be curious to hear if you have a similar reaction to the one I had. A few good starting points:

• Drop dead simple tutorial which uses construction of a simple todo list as the sample application.
• onlamp.com’s tutorial – there is a second part to this one as well.
• a response to the onlamp tutorial on slash7.com. There are a couple of other really good posts about RoR on slash7 as well.
• An introduction to Ruby for non-programmers – Why’s Poignant Guide – this is just one of the best introductions to programming I’ve ever read – fun, funny, well written, and it has an elf with a pet ham. What more can you ask for?

To give former colleagues a sense of how good I think this stuff is, I’m fairly confident that I could rebuild the notoriously buggy and never quite finished Flight to Freedom project myself, without the assistance of a programmer or DBA. I’m almost tempted to do this just for the exercise.

Anyway, check it out if you’re doing web app development. I’m glad I’m not at Bowdoin any longer – in 4 years there I couldn’t convince them to give me access to PHP despite the fact that outside of Java virtually all interesting web app development was happening on that platform. God knows how long it would take them to give me Ruby. Here at Skidmore I’ve already got it up and running for myself and am experimenting with using Rails for a project I have slated for this summer.