UC Berkeley teaches Ruby on Rails
UC Berkeley is teaching Ruby on Rails in its CS198 Rad Labs class. The class is being taught by Dave Patterson, the creator of RISC, SPARC, RAID, and more. Quite an endorsement.
Rails Envy strikes .NET and CakePHP
The fantastic team at Rails Envy is back with their Apple-style commercials comparing Ruby on Rails to a variety of competing environments. This time they have a one-two punch first striking .NET and then doing PHP/CakePHP. As always, it’s funny stuff and really nicely done. Keep it up, boys!
Two Years of Rails Podcasting
Two years ago today, Scott Barron published the first episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. —Geoffrey Grosenbach
Wow, has it been two years already? Geoffrey’s been a major positive force in the Rails community even longer then that, starting with the humble Pluralizer, which helped us all figure out what table names our ActiveRecord models were supposed to be using. For his next podcast, he’s turning the tables and letting himself be interviewed by Dan Benjamin. Be sure to send in some challenging questions (see Geoffrey’s blog post for details).
Congrats on the milestone, Geoffrey, Scott, and everyone else that’s been involved with the Rails Podcast!
Ruby and Rails continues book bonanza
O’Reilly has analyzed the book sales once again. Here are the juicy bits about Ruby and Rails books:
In the Web design and development area, it’s worth noting that Ruby on Rails has continued its blazing growth, but Ajax books have not. The decline of both PHP and ASP are striking…...Rails in the bottom middle was a small speck in last year’s first quarter post. Now the size of the box fits the size of its name at least. And its market share is almost equal to SQL and has surpassed VBA, Perl and Python. Python is also experiencing good growth, just not at the blazing velocity of Ruby. I would expect by next year, we will see Ruby have an even larger share/square.
Computerworld names Rails #1 tech to know
Computerworld is pinning Rails as the #1 technology to know in 2007. As the only piece of software among group of hardware including NAND drives and new CPUs. About Rails they write:
Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications. One of the central tenets emphasizes using less code for application development by avoiding redundancy and following Rails conventions. This means increased performance and, ideally, decreased development times.
JRuby enters the home stretch for Rails support
We’re on the home stretch now, and Rails is getting more and more solid every day. With you all helping, we should be able to finish off the remaining failures, clean up major outstanding JRuby issues, and kick out a pretty sweet “Rails-supporting” JRuby release in the next couple weeks. —Charles Nutter
I’m not a Java guy by any means, but I don’t think anyone disagrees that this is great news. Why? The idea of dynamic languages on the JVM is very appealing, even Ryan Tomayko thinks so.
Now, being a recovering C# programmer, I had no idea how to get JRuby installed and running. So, here’s a quick newbie guide for you Mac OSX users. If you have good instructions for other platforms beyond what’s in the JRuby blog, please post or link to them in the comments. Also, be sure to use the proper reporting channels for any bugs you come across: the Rails Trac for Rails bugs, and JRuby’s JIRA for JRuby issues.
- First, you need java. Luckily, it happens to ship with Tiger. “java -version” tells me I have v1.5.0_06. Awesome.
- I actually set this up over the weekend, and used ‘ant test’ to build and test JRuby. This required me to install JUnit to proceed. I just created a directory to act as my CLASSPATH, and threw junit-4.1.jar in there.
- Set up a few environment variables (see below for the list).
- Add /path/to/jruby/bin to your PATH.
export CLASSPATH=/path/to/junit-4.1.jar
export JRUBY_HOME=/path/to/jruby
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
export JRUBY_SHELL=/bin/zsh
After this was done, I was able to run jruby or jirb directly. Depending on where you add the jruby/bin path, you may or may not be using the JRuby gem script or not. Use ‘which gem’ to check.
There you go, you should be all ready to help the JRuby folks out.
The Rails Edge
I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with something to say about The Rails Edge that isn't already obvious. The problem is that everyone already knows that Dave Thomas and Mike Clark have been delivering top-notch Ruby on Rails training since last year, so I don't have to say what a good deal this event will be. All the speakers are already famous Rails peeps in their own rights and don't need their virtues extolled (even Marcel). And I certainly don't need to tell anyone how much fun it is hanging out with a bunch of Rails folks for three days.
One thing I can offer is a personal testimonial as to the quality of the Pragmatic Studio programs. I took the Rails Studio back in January. Up until then I'd only dabbled with Rails. After taking the studio I had the knowledge to build real applications, and now I've got a job doing Rails development full time and am an author on the official Rails blog.. One can never know what might have been so I can't say I owe it all to that training, but I certainly got a lot from it and happily give it credit for getting me going in the right direction.
This year, RailsConf and RubyConf both sold out in a matter of hours. There is a huge demand for conferences - people want to learn what's up in the Rails world, to meet other Rails developers, and to improve their Rails development skills. We've started to see some regional conferences being organized which could potentially be pretty cool, but there is always a place for a professional production like The Rails Edge. If you're looking to get more involved in Rails, you should check it out.
It's raining awards for Rails
First we snatched the Jolt Award for Rails 1.0, now the RadRails team has snatched the Best Open Source Eclipse-based Developer Tool at EclipseCon. Rock on, guys!
Rails and the Agile book win top honors at Jolt awards
Tonight at the Software Development Jolt Awards, Rails won the best web development tool award while the canonical Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails, won for best technical book. They find themselves both in fine company.
Both DHH and Dave Thomas share their reactions.
The full list of winners can be found here.
Just in time for the holiday season, the Peace Library
The Peace Library is an online index of Conflict Transformation & Peacebuilding information featuring research papers, reports, and news related to the Sri Lanka peace process put together by the non-profit web media company InfoShare.
It’s in “beta” but already features 207 publications wrapped in an attractive interface. Read more about them here.
Yet another nice app riding the Rails.
ThoughtWorks wins big contract on Rails
Obie Fernandez has a great story on how ThoughtWorks recently won a $800,000 bid for a critical application against another consultancy. They probably do that all the time, but the interesting part about this particular bid is that they made it powered by Ruby on Rails. The other consultancy bid a million dollars for a Java-based system, but the CIO picked the Rails solution from ThoughtWorks.
So saving $200,000 was obviously a big advantage of the Rails bid, but more interesting is the second-level concerns. Obie writes:
Analysts from Gartner and Forrester and even members of his personal grapevine are all abuzz about Ruby… Ruby may not be a corporate standard (yet), but don’t even get him started on his organization’s dismal track record building J2EE applications… The risk of late delivery is much, much scarier to him than proceeding with a relatively unproven technology that the whole world seems to be talking about as the successor to Java.
This story comes hot on the heels of Stuart Halloway’s exposure of how Rails makes it possible for his consultancy to win accounts over Java solutions due to higher productivity. As he put it:
Developers have more fun, make more money, and customers get better products cheaper and faster.
Indeed.
UPDATE: The story is indeed “fictional”, but with the very deep underlining of “inspired by real events”. Obie has no permission to speak on specific deals of ThoughtWorks, so names have been withheld to protect the real involved parties and the exact figures, estimates, and so on.
.NET'ers tell Scoble why they left for Rails
Microsoft’s Robert Scoble is concerned about the exodus of developers like Phil Ripperger that are leaving .NET for Ruby on Rails. Phil put it like this:
Scoble, as a web developer who is now doing freelance work for a living, my framework of choice is Ruby on Rails. Mostly for the reasons listed here. And also because Microsoft’s web development technologies have lost their appeal. I can remember being blown away by ASP.NET when I first saw it. I now feel even more strongly about Rails. And when I talk to businesses and friends who are developers, I make sure they know about Rails.
Sure, I know about the new Visual Studio, ASP.NET 2.0, the new SharePoint, and the new SQL Server. And I just don’t care. Microsoft needs to capture some of the 360 magic and use it on their web development technology or they will continue to lose developers like me.
Scoble is inviting people to tell him and Microsoft why .NET and family just isn’t doing it for them any more. If you have a good story to share, do let them know.
How picking Rails over Java affects bidding
Stuart Halloway explains in numbers how picking Rails over Java affects the bids he puts in for consulting jobs. Since the actual programming is only one part of the bid, Rails naturally only has a chance to affect that part. But still, the approach that Stuart takes in differentiating between the two is quite interesting.
For applications that Justin consider “within the sweet spot of Rails”, the bid will usually be 30-50% lower. For stuff outside that sweet spot, the bid will still be about 10% lower than the equivalent Java one.
Ruby the Rival: What does Java look like post-Rails?
O’Reilly’s ONJava.com had a chat with four prominent Java developers under the title of “Ruby the Rival”. Half of them has switched a big chunk of their development to Rails.
James Duncan Davidson notes about the maintainability of Rails applications and the size of the apps that can be built with it:
Can a team write a Ruby on Rails app that performs a large number of features, does it well, and is maintainable over time? Yes. No question. After working with Ruby on Rails for a while, I would be confident tackling any size web application problem with it. But, that’s because I’ve spent some time with it and now have seen that it’s possible to write a well-designed application.
Bruce Tate on what increased productivity means for organizations:
What if the productivity numbers are real? What if you really can get a 5x boost? Then, you can do the work of divisions with a department, and the work of departments with a team of two.
Do read the whole thing.
