Rails caught my eye around this time last year

It was about this time last year when going through my reading material, I see Ruby on Rails mentioned in Business Weeek. What the heck? If the folks at Business Week were already on top of a _new_ web development environment, why did I not hear about this? This is my trade, I oversee quite a bit of web development, what the heck?

Like most busy people, I was probably too preoccupied with my own stuff, my own technology, my own projects.

Seeing Ruby on Rails mentioned in Business Week (or was it Information Week?) was a wake up call. I had to do more research on happening Web 2.0 stuff. If Google gave these guys the Hacker of the Year Award in 2005, this had to be promising technology.

First things first ... who is behind this? Sun pushes Java, Microsoft pushes .NET, who is pushing Rails? Where is the Big money? Who the heck is 37signals anyway?

As far as I could tell, this was a grass roots effort. It just did not make sense. Why would everyone be so gaga about an MVC Framework written by what seems to be a young kid from Denmark. Needed to dig more.

Rails was written in Ruby. Ruby? I had heard of Python, heck we use Python quite a bit, PHP (we never really used it, but that is another story altogether). Ruby was developed in Japan and did not have an English reference book until 2000? And for the four years before Rails, it survived mainly as a novelty scripting language for hobbyist developers. Why would anyone pick Ruby to develop a web framework? This was getting interesting...

Ruby turned out to be a scripting language on steroids. Heavily Object Oriented, extremely flexible almost to the point that I did not understand how anything would run in Ruby (parenthesis - optional, end of line markers - optional, override any class, single inheritance - phew ... read more ... not so, you can circumvent and get single inheritance and mixins, what the heck?).

So I download the e-book AgileWebDevelopment and go at it. Install the stuff on my Windows machine (heck I had left the Mac a couple of years ago to feel the pain others in my company feel - as the head IT guy, I had to feel the pain). So now used to the Windows machine install MySQL, Notepad++ and Ruby. No biggie, I am running and trying to follow along.

Rails turned out to be a lot more complex than I anticipated. Sure you can type some commands and you get a CRUD, but we write full blown apps, so we are used to the easy examples and bypass them to go to the real stuff. I found myself stuck in first gear. I just could not get the hang of it.

Then I got busy again ... that was December 2005... and my Rails first encounter came and went.