[cumbria_lug] Ruby / Ruby on Rails

[Luke Antins]

I'm sure Schwuk mentioned Ruby[1] at the last meeting, when talking about
Campfire[2].
So I'm sure I'll get at least one reply ;-)

Recently while setting up a OpenBSD dev server, I wanted to try out
lighttpd[3] rather then Apache.
My initial plan was to use PHP with lighttpd, however... while looking at
the documentation I noticed a *lot* of talk about setting up lighttpd with
Ruby and in particular Ruby on Rails[4]. This warranted some further
investigation.

Several screencasts[5] (available on the Ruby on Rails website) later I was
in awe at what I saw, almost too good to be true! I spend most of my day
programming in PHP and using my own type of 'framework' to get common tasks
done like user management and authentication... Ruby on Rails offers this
type of thing and more! (including unit testing! yay!) it looks to be an
excellent framework for rapid development of dynamic websites.

Excited about this new framework, I looked into the language that pokers
Ruby on Rails, Ruby!
Ruby is a 'true' (with a few 'exceptions') OO language, it reads very
cleanly and does a good job of decreasing the amount of code needed to do a
job.

So... impressed by the framework, impressed by the language! I need to give
this a go myself!

I write this as Ruby is compiling on a dev server, I'm most defiantly
looking forward to playing around with it.
Who knows? perhaps it will be the language & framework I favour and suggest
for future web development projects later down the line. Its certain causing
a bit of a stir in the Java circles and other communities, I figure this is
a good opportunity to jump aboard and get ahead before things become even
more popular!

...

Has anyone else played with Ruby / Ruby on Rails? Opinions? Suggestions?
Gripes?

[1] http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
[2] http://www.campfirenow.com/
[3] http://www.lighttpd.net/
[4] http://www.rubyonrails.org/
[5] http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts

--
Luke Antins