Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Dallas Ruby Brigade

I went to the first Dallas Ruby Brigade last night. I was surprised at how many people were there. I think I heard that the count was 38 which is bigger than any of the Macromedia User Group meetings were last year. I was even more more surprised at how many people were using Ruby (and not just Rails) for real world projects. It was good to see the group off to such a start though. Combined with other recent Dallas area web development community successes like Barcamp, it seems as if the Dallas scene is very healthy.

I've just been going through the Agile Web Development with Rails book, no real world use yet. I like a lot of the Rails ideas and I'm glad to see how influential it has been on other frameworks especially in regard to minimizing configuration. I do a lot of web development that is right in Rails' sweet spot so I could see using it soon.

It is nice to have everything in one place, instead of like Java where you have to decide among all the choices for similar functionality. Hibernate or ObJectRelationalBridge? Tapestry or Spring? Oh, wait! Having everything decided for me was one of the things I didn't like about .NET! I guess Rails just makes most of the decisions the same way I would have so I'm okay with it.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Agile Web Development with Rails is quite an easy read. I love how it explores the thought process of the programmer, without jumping straight into code. It's chocked full of real-world concepts and makes learning the language fun. I've written quite a few experimental apps with RoR already, and finding my way around was quite simple. The language itself, still takes some getting used to, but all in all, is still easy to grasp.

Have you looked into using Cake? If you like Rails, you'll love Cake as well.

Good to see you blogging man.

10:48 AM  
Blogger John Nicholas said...

I've looked at Cake a little. I haven't pushed that very far because my PHP development is mostly centered around Typo3 right now so I am using the APIs and templates from that.

I am using AMFPHP though and that stuff runs separately from Typo3 so the integration there might be a great place to start.

11:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wished i was there. Good to see you blogging!

7:33 PM  

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