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Must! Resist! Ruby! on! Rails!

In certain circles there’s a fair bit of the excitement being expressed by early adopters of the Ruby On Rails web framework. I for one have been studiously trying to ignore it for two reasons.

Firstly, it is Yet Another Web Framework. Seriously, these things are a dime-a-dozen. If past experience is anything to go by, it’s almost never worth investing any serious time in these things, as they come and go with the weather.

Secondly, it is written in Yet Another Scripting Language. I resisted the pleas of a Ruby evangelist at work for some time on the basis that I already know enough python to get me into trouble. And anyway how much better than python can a language get?

This evening I saw an amazing demonstration of Ruby on Rails, and now my whole world is crumbling around me.

I heartily recommend you don’t view it if you have any emotional investment in any other web framework.

[Note to self: next time you’re demoing something, try saying “Whoops!” when you introduce an new feature, it really unsettles the audience!]

Sorry to be predicatable but you could do more with less effort using Archetypes http://plone.org/documentation/archetypes/ and if you really want to get excited you can do the whole thing from a UML diagram.

I’m promised I’ll get time to evangelise it the SyPy meeting after next.

I must get me to one of them Sydney Python meetings.

Anyone played with Nevow and Livepage? I pushed ~50 updates per second from the server to a counter on the page on my first try. Fun stuff.

The next SyPy meeting is tomorrow 21/7 at 6:30 at the squirres brew house in king st warf.

Don’t forget Django for all your rails-like python web framework needs.