The Building of Basecamp workshop turned out to be a great success. The eight hours of the sold-out event flew by with tons of great questions from the audience and a real sense of shared understanding. Besides pushing all of the underlining themes for our development process, including Less Software and Say No By Default, I got plenty of opportunity to push Ruby on Rails.
The split was about 50/50 between developers and designers, so our broad approach spanning individual design techniques (like the yellow fade), to the wonders of MVC as a structure for web-applications, to promotion and pricing of a web-based application went over very well.
So this could easily turn out to be something we'd be interested in repeating. Perhaps even outside Chicago or even the US. So if you have concrete leads on how we could get a venue and gather 50 people at ~$400, we'd certainly be interested in hearing from you.
It was great to meet you and the guys from 37 Signals. I do need to adopt more of your approach and solve "today's problems" rather than always worry about what might come "someday" in the future. Even though most of my questions bordered on the unanswerable, nevertheless, the responses were helpful or confirming of ideas that I was working on. I guess that's how my head works.
Anyway, I've met a bunch of web standards folks out in San Francisco and I think that they'd certainly love to meet up for a discussion about using web standards in web applications. I'd love to plan it if you're interested, using Basecamp as the model. What do you think?
Okay David, all you need to be thinking about right now is getting rails done. You got me, I attended the workshop and decided I really want to learn Ruby. So now that I'm learning it, your framework would be a boon.
You've done an awful lot of pushing of Rails, but you're still pushing air - only ActiveRecord is available at the moment.
I see that the Rails site now says "mid to late July" - what's left to develop at this point (keeping in mind that there's no such thing as 'perfect')?
Part of the reason that the Active Record was so well-received stems from not rushing things. With Rails, I've wanted to launch with complete examples and full documentation. The code is all done, but it would do a disservice to release it without the knowledge needed to make the most of it.
So for now you'll either have to live with the air and the Active Record. But the latter is a good indicator of the kind of framework that Rails is. So if you don't like that, there's no reason to stick around for the rest.
seeing ex-Amazonians (am i inferring correctly?) talking to you, i was wondering if this could lead to introducing HTML::Masonic AOP to Views in Rails.
the autohandler concept of HTML::Mason (as applied to presentation) and the associated inheritance mechanism cannot be hyped enough, it gets rid of a LOT of messy duplication of HTML, it just beats the pants of trying to use "include" mechanisms to achieve same.
I'm nearly finished with a template-toolkit lookalike for ruby, which I hope to post soon. It includes wrappers, filters, etc.
Looking forward to see the 'rails' part, as I'm so happy with activerecord, however I'm more of a fan of perl's new maypole framework, so I'm working on a similar thing to that as well. It includes a default wrapper you can set, which seems similar to the autohandler mason things. I wish you'd post more implementation details about how rails will work :) I guess its not that far off!
Can you tell I'm a recent convert from perl? The main difference I'm finding is that I feel *happy* after a day's programming with ruby :)
