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Re: Help vision

Subject: Re: Help vision
From: Lou Quillio <public -at- quillio -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 19:10:40 -0400


mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com wrote:

Having never used Ruby-on-Rails, I was wondering if you could give a quick run-down. What kind of footprint does it have (I use mostly Win XP at work and Linux at home).
Headquarters IT/Security dept. has been very picky lately about what we load on our systems.

Very light footprint. Ruby (which I've written exactly none of -- well, until yesterday) is just an interpreted scripting language. Kinda cool, really. Easy to pick up.

RoR is a Ruby-based web-dev framework. "Web-dev" in the sense of HTTP, not necessarily Internet. HTTP server built-in (or use your own, maybe LightTPD); filesystem serves as a a data store (or use your own, maybe SQLlite).

Other folks (or you, yourself) write "Gems", essentially special purpose libraries that do useful stuff, that are then stitched together, RAD-style, into applications.

The 37signals stuff is too cool for words, that's why I'm interested. But you don't need to get into RoR or even Ruby to get a taste.

I've previously decided to forgo other interesting tools because they wanted an entire development environment to live in/on, and not the one that is supported for our developers.

Install Instiki at home, on Linux. It's a cinch. To a certain mind, a wiki like Instiki can be a great personal organizer/ note-taker/ brain-dump tool, with yourself as the only user. The built-in PDF- and HTML-dumping is just a bonus -- and what serves to keep it loosely on-topic, along with general business interest in wikis.

This is mind-expanding stuff, in the right hands.

And hey, if nothing else, somebody at work will start talking about it eventually, and it's good to be informed. "AJAX"-based apps (like Gmail, like BaseCamp, like flickr) will soon be everywhere.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/03/you_got_your_aj.html

LQ

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RE: Help vision: From: mlist

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