Spare time has been terribly sparse as of late. Summer classes have begun and I’m absorbed by the subject.
I’m trying to hit two birds with one stone. I’m learning Ruby on Rails (RoR) by using it to prototype future features of the UP Barops website. To the non-techies in the audience, Ruby is a great computer language. Rails is a framework built on Ruby that enables one to build dynamic, data-driven web sites with ease and joy.
I’m an old timer when it comes to web developement. I’ve seen the state of the craft move from plain html, to customized scripts, to overhyped web application frameworks. I still feel the pain of having to work with Broadvision, the joy of finding PHP. But this must be thus far the most fun I’ve had working on web backends. Part of me is tempted to quit this law thing and just go back to coding full time. It’s that good.
Throughout my RoR sessions, I kept getting a sense of deja vu. Looking at the views provided by the scaffolding mechanism, it finally hit me. The rapid prototyping, the default views, the request system: very much like working with Lotus Domino, an underrated app server, in my opinion. The architecture isn’t as neat as RoR, but the thought was there: NSF’s in the model layer, Agents as controllers, and views as, well, views.
My only problem is that although I can happily build away with a local rails install (thanks to Instantrails), I haven’t encountered a local hosting provider that supports it. Ploghost probably might, but only once they know it enough to meet the support requirements (smart). I hope they can pull it off. Sooner than later, so we can host the UP Barops Site there. Ploghost, by the way, are the folks who host the iBlog website – for free for almost a year now. Part of my job is to maintain this site, and Ploghost has been durn great to work with. The most fun I’ve had working with a host (and I’ve been through the UUNET days). It’ll be way greater, of course, if they roll out Rails 
Entries (RSS)