August 18, 2005
Enjoying Rails thanks to Dave Thomas
I think I'm just about hooked...
Having noticed the potential of Ruby on Rails (RoR) a little more than a year ago, and observed the debate ever since, until recently I have been a curious bystander rather than an active user.
Dave Thomas (the pragmatic programmer) changed that with Agile Web Development with Rails, the recently published book that he co-wrote with David Heinemeier Hansson (the originator of RoR). I've been thoroughly enjoying building the Depot application that is the focus of part two of the book. Dave has a gift for writing; this book is a gem.
Along the way I have been experimenting with different editors on OS X. At first I used SubEthaEdit but tired of it's cumbersome windowing and dependency on Finder. Being an Eclipse fan for Java development, I then tried the Ruby Development Tools plugin but that doesn't support ERB files. I've now settled on TextMate, which has very nice support for Rails and has improved significantly since I tried it a while back.
Regardless of the ultimate success or otherwise of RoR and various opinions of the framework's merits, it is suffice to say that I'm having fun!
Posted to Rails by Keith Pitty