I sat in on most of DHH’s Ruby on Rails presentation this afternoon, and I have to say I’m in danger of catching the religion. Like a good cult leader, Hansson is energetic, intelligent, and unwavering in his faith that his is the right path. Within 30 minutes of the end of the session I had installed Rails via DarwinPorts, though my schedule hasn’t left me much time to play with it.
Ruby on Rails has inspired a lot of admiring imitators. In theory you can keep on using Python, Perl, PHP, Java, or C# while reaping the benefits of the Rails model. Ruby fanatics will tell you that the language’s intrisic qualities are part of the bargain, which may be true, but all this activity is not just faddishness – Rails is essentially doing evangelism for a structured style of rapid development that is unfamiliar to many people.
I’ve been on Web Application Framework Safari for the past couple weeks. The new hotness is Ruby on Rails, which has inspired lots of imitators. Not necessarily a bad thing. Because I do so much PHP work I was curious what kind of work had been done to bring this style of development to PHP. I found CakePHP.
I’ll say this for them, they write good enough documentation that I actually had a working mini-site at the end of the first tutorial I tried.