I started messing around with Ruby on Rails for the first time on Sunday. This was after spending all day Saturday tearing down kitchen cupboards, tiled sinks and entire walls for a friend who is remodeling his house, so I got my fill of building last weekend whether real or virtual.
 Photo: bruce grant |
Trying to figure out how Ruby on Rails worked, I felt like I was remodeling my brain. It was as if I walked into Ikea with just a basic idea of what I wanted my new kitchen to look like and then walked out with design schematics and new appliances an hour later. I suddenly had confidence that I could create a really nice web site with a lot of functionality that was basically inaccessible to me before because of my limited programming background.
The “Ah hah!” moment came for me when I added two words to one of the scripts: “scaffold mydatabase”. When I refreshed my web site, I was adding, editing and deleting data in my database via a web interface. It all automatically just worked. Then literally 15 minutes later I had 2 databases talking to eachother.
It’s mindblowing how much power this environment gives to people who aren’t true coders.
I have a feeling I’ll get stuck and frustrated with what I’m trying to build. But I’m very hopeful Ruby on Rails will get me closer than I could with open source PHP tools. If nothing else, I’ll get a sense for this new trend.
Programming seems to have about a 3 year fashion cycle that also intersects with influxes of new ideas for web applications and a full cycle of students coming out of university. Now we’re at the early stages of a creative explosion on the Internet enabled by things like Rails, open APIs, storage solutions like S3, and JSON. And you can also wrap an idea in any number of different business models in even less time than it takes to build the product itself.
Maybe instead of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), we now have RASH (Rails, APIs, S3, Hosted).
There must be similar reactions to breakthroughs in the construction industry when things like cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) hit the market. Of course, construction suffers from bad naming as much as any other trade. Not everything can be as cool as a sawzall or funny pipe.
Hey, I thought I’d drop you a line and note to say to watch for our new ruby on rails application that we’re building. It’s a similar product to sugar (and so is our approach to market) called XLsuite – http://www.xlsuite.org
The .com is still to come where we’ll do the hosted version, but the open source model is already up and running. It’s a system that I designed for my lighting company but wanted to expand into other markets.
We’re almost finished the new navigation (so every version can stop looking like a christmas light site 🙂 which should be up in the 2 weeks. (preview it here: http://www.ixld.com/demos/static )
I’ve added you to my start page, nice blog 🙂
Riel Roussopoulos
http://www.ixld.com