I read an O’Reilly OnLAMP article about Ruby on Rails. It is nothing short of amazing. Ruby’s a pretty cool language; I remember reading about some socket programming stuff two or three years ago in Dr. Dobbs on the way back from Kalgoorlie. It seemed really straight-forward yet powerful. Looking at it is on my list just after Python, though with Rails being so wicked it might be creeping up.

I won’t rehash the article, but for those that are too slack to read it I’ll explain what Rails is. It’s a framework for developing web-applications. What makes it really cool though is that from a database structure it will create all the necessary methods for interacting with the data, and the webforms all by itself. It has a cool “scaffold” feature that puts the standard create/edit/delete/list/view web forms and pages together. This means that you can prototype an idea in a matter of minutes.

It uses a templating system so that later when you have nice HTML (like what Jimmy designs, for example) you simply replace the ‘guts’ with some Ruby tags and update the classes to reference your methods rather than the scaffold ones.

Bruce Perens wrote a step-by-step guide to installing Ruby and Rails on Debian Unstable (which is the same instructions as Sarge/Testing). It was really un-nerving correcting a minor mistake and adding my own tip to his wiki article. He’s a former Debian project leader, and one of my most respected community and industry figures. A nerd-god ;)

I followed his steps and it all worked fine, and change the server IP config so it didn’t start on 127.0.0.1. I got the “congratulations” message. Now I want to try out the above-mentioned OnLAMP article and see how that works out.

If it’s as good as I’m expecting, you might see me switch from PHP to Ruby! Stay tuned ;)