So I finally gave in to the hype and downloaded the new Web 2.0 programming language, Ruby on Rails.

Ruby is a relatively new (1998, I believe) programming language that aims right for “developer productivity”. Someone sat down, I suppose, and combined all the easy-to-use-but-powerful parts of Smalltalk, Python and Perl. Does the world NEED a new programming language? Well, usually the answer is no but Ruby is starting to gain some traction as a powerful tool. People are starting to port Ruby to .NET even.

Rails is a web application framework developed by the folks at 37 Signals for Ruby. 37 Signals is famous for their easy to use web applications such as Basecamp, Backpack and Ta Da List.

The claim made by Ruby on Rails is that you could get a new web application up and running in minutes, where it would take days using another language such as ASP.NET. Now when hearing someone claim a web site could be up and running in “minutes”, I instinctively roll my eyes and think, “Yeah, right.”

Last night I ran through the ONLamp Ruby on Rails tutorial, and I must admit to being impressed.

Perhaps the revolutionary feature is this thing called “scaffolds”. Rails will actually provide a default set of CRUD (create, read, update, delete) pages for any database table. So if you have a database table of employees, you simply run a couple of command line programs, and Rails will create a bunch of web pages to let to manage those tables through the browser. It's amazing. Maybe you have to see it in action to be blown away.

I'm still getting into it. I'll spend more time with it tonight. But I have just begun customizing those pages, and working with multiple tables.

I will update this blog later with more on my experience with Ruby. Maybe I'll even have a web application to share with the world, in 15 minutes development time!