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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Sun, 12 Jun 2005

Ruby On Rails is Amazing-- and No Fluff Just Stuff
I went to the RTP Software Symposium (also known as No Fluff Just Stuff this weekend... it was a great collection of people, both the speakers and the attendees. If you get a chance to attend, I'd encourage you to make the time.

The conferences run over the weekend so that people who have trouble taking time off from work can still attend. The conference travels all over the US so you shouldn't have to travel too far to attend one. I got lucky and they held one ten minutes from my front door!

One of the presentations was by Dave Thomas. He introduced Ruby On Rails, an open source web framework written in Ruby.

To put it plainly, it was simply amazing. I've never seen anyone take a tool and create as much as he did that quickly. During the last thirty minutes of the talk, Dave created a shopping cart. He (and Rails) created admin pages for editing products, a set of pages for viewing and purchasing products, and a basic shopping cart that would track what you wanted to buy. During the time he created this working shopping cart, he was also taking questions, teaching us Ruby, and stopping to tell a story or two.

I reviewed Dave and Andy's first Ruby book, so I've been exposed to the language, but I've never written any Ruby code. Not a line. But you know what? I didn't need to know Ruby to follow the demonstration or to type in the tutorial from Dave's new Rail's book (which is in beta now). The examples guide you as they go.

It's not often that I'll take time to learn a completely different technology because I think it will save me enough time to be worth it, but I'm tinkering with Rails now. I suggest that you do the same.

posted at: 21:15 | path: | permanent link to this entry