* Ruby on Rails
In my Gearhead column for Network World, I’ve written about the Ruby programming language with enthusiasm (see editorial links below), which is understandable as Ruby is elegant, powerful, open source, and free.
As the authors’ “What’s Ruby?” page says: “Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.” In other words, it is an excellent choice for Web applications programming.
For those of you who are looking for an enterprise-application development system and like the sound of Ruby, there’s a framework you should look at: Ruby on Rails.
As the Ruby on Rails site explains: “Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.” The authors also describe Ruby as “the language of love for industry heavy-weights.”
Some of the attributes of Rails are compelling: Web application development is reputed to be at least 10 times faster compared to a typical Java framework. Also, the system requires less coding which is why development is faster and which results in fewer bugs. In turn, this means that your code is easier to understand, maintain, and modify.
Another important issue is there are no long-winded, complex XML configuration files because Rails doesn’t use them. Rails applications use simple programming conventions that allow configuration to be determined by reflection and discovery.
The O’Reilly OnLamp.com Web site has two excellent articles on Rails that are excellent backgrounders to Rails.
If you have any experience with Ruby on Rails or plan to start using it, let me know.
