DHHNote 2007
DHH is reviewing the State of the Ruby on Rails Union:
1 million downloads of the Rails gem
hundreds of plugins (at least 600...I wonder how many generators)
10,000 people in rubyonrails-talk Google group (and several hundred in the IRC channel)
jobs looking for more experience in RoR than DHH has (reminds me of the early Java job listings)
most attendees are getting paid in some capacity to write in Rails (I looked around as we raised our hands) vs 1/2 the room at RubyConf a few years ago
lots of books (documentation is definitely key)
Now onto Rails 2.0...
It's not a unicorn, but real. (But Rails 3.0 will be a pony.) No bomb dropping like last year (cough REST cough). On the other hand, resources will be more central to Rails 2.0.
Single models can be represented by multiple resources. It doesn't have to be just the standard 7 actions. It can have related resources as well. This is a good improvement over the way we specify resources today in 1.2. The resource scaffold is now the default scaffold.
Next up, DHH did a quick demo of customizing a resource. Also he demoed the ActiveResource client library which works with resources remotely. Man we've come a long way since the Java/COBRA Orfali/Harkey book that was like a phone book that explained how to do client/server apps. I think it shows the triumph of convention over configuration.
ActionWebService has left the building. Rails is not the Switzerland of frameworks (or perhaps you could say its not the Swiss Army Knife of frameworks.) Following Dave Thomas's suggestion from last year, Rails is slimming down the core and making more things be plug-ins and ActionWebService is now a plug-in.
Current friends of Rails: AJAX and REST. Future allies: ATOM (for feeds) and OpenID. (More from DHH in the next post...)
- Previous: 9 Things that DHH likes about Rails 2.0
- Next: RailsConf is huge