I’ve been talking (and hyping) Rails for so long that it’s all wierd to finally have it out in the open. Mind you, we’re still not talking about a 1.0 release, but the package currently on offer is still something I’m very comfortable to share with the world. Undoubtedly, there could be more documentation and more examples, but Real Artists Ship and this piece will grow in public. Enjoy Rails!
UPDATE: Want to know more about how we built Basecamp using Rails (and how we built Rails using Basecamp)? Attend the Building of Basecamp Workshop on September 17th in Chicago. You better hurry too, it's already half full (and the last one sold out a month in advance).
Congratulations. I'm really looking forward to starting to learn Ruby and to use rails in the coming months. Now only if we can get some hosting providers to support ruby.
Challenge by awk on July 24, 23:23
Hi David, congratulations!
PS. I'm the slashdot anon coward from a few posts back .. didn't think anybody would read my post let alone mod it up, glad to spread the word. :-)
It's especially interesting to me because a year or so ago for my work projects I created a framework in Perl that *tried* to be what Rails is.. the philosophy was to do as little work as possible to get the job done.. it was okay but now I'm excited to see it "done right"!
Eh.. David? I thought Rails was just a nice MVC implementation. It's not. I just watched the introductory quicktime and I've completely lost my ability to form coherent sentences. I'm stunned, numb, my head is spinning. Amazing.
If this doesn't make people start developing with Ruby, literally nothing will.
Thank you all so much! It's very exciting to get this level of response so soon in the game. I'll do my outmost to deserve it with forthcoming releases of the framework(s).
Oops... Rails seems to be incompatible with Windows -- it relies heavily on symlinks. Cygwin is not really an option, as it's not "other-than-ISO-8859-1"-friendly.
Leonya: Right. *nix is the primary target for Rails, but perhaps I'll find time to make a version compatible with Windows at one point to. Both the Active Record and Action Pack works on Windows. In the mean time, I recommend upgrading your OS to either a nix flavor or OS X. You'll be glad you did :)
Brian: No. The 4-KLOC number quoted for Basecamp is all business logic and control flow. Not the Rails framework.
Start by replacing all the symlinks with copies of the real files. Most of the symlinks point to stuff available in vendor/railties. Then try to change the shebang lines of public/dispatch*. That should get you started.
Challenge by Rich Barton on July 26, 14:36
Slightly OT: The text editor (TextMate) you (or whoever) are using in the "Getting Started" video looks quite interesting, yet no amount of googling has yet led to any information on this app. Any idea as to where one might download it?
PS Will be giving Rails a try shortly. Looks damn cool.
TextMate is still incognito. We'll be releasing more information about it shortly. And yes, it's crazy cool :). I left Xcode and Subethaedit behind weeks ago.
Great stuff, Leonya. Perhaps you could do an attempt to make it packageable? Have a look at the RailTies project on RubyForge. That's what I use to generate the *nix version of Rails.
Challenge by awk on July 26, 18:17
David where is the best place to report features and bugs?
The ERuby template renderer hangs for me on Gentoo Linux. I changed it to use StringIO to get it working.
On that note: I use a modified Eruby which HTML-escapes everything by default, with another tag () for including HTML unescaped (lack of this destinction is a pet peeve of mine).
When I use it, it breaks the "scaffolding" feature. What do you think about outputting the HTML directly for the scaffold without a template? Or hard-wire scaffolding to use ERb always (since ERb should be available no matter what).
A 'me too' on TextMate - looks like exactly what I've been looking for!
And congratulations on the rails release - I've been putting off starting work on a large PHP app so I could get a taste of Rails and see if it would be the better job - and guess what, I think I'm convinced!
