Rails onslaught

In case you have been living under a rock, Ruby on Rails is gaining more momentum than any new framework I've seen. Within the past week or so, there have been announcements for 4 books about Rails.

1. PragDave is writing Agile Web Development with Rails, estimated in July.


2. Marcel Molina (noradio) and Scott Barron (htonl) are writing "Pragmatic Rails Recipes: A Guide to Elegant Web Development" which will published by the Pragmatic Programmers, estimated in Fall 2005.


3. Ralf Wirdemann is writing "Web-Entwicklung mit Ruby on Rails", a German book due late in 2005.


4. Most surprisingly, Bruce Tate and Dave Geary (JSF expert group member) with be writing a book on Rails as part of the O'Reilly Developer's Notebook series

The last one is the one that really threw me for a loop. I've been learning the latest cruel injustice that Sun will bestow to the Java world, a.k.a. JSF. I've been following Dave Geary's blog. I've referenced him a couple of times on this blog using his quotes as reasons to avoid JSF. Anyway, he and David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails creator) had a few exchanges about Rails. Now, he is writing a book on it?? Here are the links to give those unfamiliar some context:

1. Geary's first post


2. DHH's rebuttal


3. Geary's second post

Some other interesting endorsements have shown up. Bruce Perens, uber Open Source Advocate, had this to say on the rails irc channel (#rubyonrails):

In 1981, when I started working on Unix, I remember being blown away by the power of the command-line pipes-and-filters paradigm. You could get real work done with simplicity, clarity, and economy of notation that wasn’t available in anything else at the time. I’ve worked with lots of programming environments since then, but none of them gave me that feeling of being able to write a solution so well that working code just flew off of my fingers. Until now: Ruby on Rails achieves for web programming the same sort of conceptual leap that Unix made for file-handling. You’ve got to try it!

And finally this ancedote from comp.lang.ruby posted by Curt Hibbs.

Frankly, I'm not as enthused as the rest of the world with Rails, Seaside is my web framework of choice, but I am ecstatic to see Ruby getting the long overdue attention it deserves! Let's hope that they can keep this momentum up.