In my office room that I share with a couple of other guys, we have a board on which buzz words are posted. When I take a look at the board right now I see: “wire protocol”, “class library” and “service oriented architecture” There is also a section on yesterday’s buzzwords, i.e, buzzwords that are going out of fashion. And when I look at this part, I see “ruby on rails” (RoR) as one of them. How did it get there? I suggested it. Well I kind of mentioned something about a story I read and my office mate figured I was suggesting it should go there.
The whole story started when I mentioned that I was reading another story on slashdot about a guy, Derek Sivers, who decided to switch back to PHP from RoR after two years of trying to develop an application for his CD sales website. (The website itself has a pretty nice concept by the way). But back to the point, this guy was trying to use RoR to build the website and apparently it was not working out for him because the site’s backend design was initially not conceived for implementation in RoR. After two years he decided to switch back and apparently the entire experience was not totally useless because he learnt a lot of tricks that he reapplied to his rewrite.
I thought I would post this because by some interesting coincidence (or not) the very next day I read an announcement in a newsletter from sitepoint.com that they were giving away the complete PDF of the book on building web applications using RoR… for free! Usually they have sample chapters of the books they sell so that you can whet your appetite and decide whether you want to buy it. Perhaps the article struck some fear in the RoR people? Just specualation on my part but I thought it was an interesting coincidence all the same. We all know there is no such thing as free… as in free beer!
