The Lair of the Pythia

Mike Pence has an interview with Michael Swindell of CodeGear about the company’s plans for Ruby. Right near the bottom Swindell mentioned that CodeGear will be making announcements about their plans at a Rails conference, presumably this one. So, two months to wait for something concrete, but I think it is pretty obvious what is planned.

Well, this is interesting. I’ve been following up some of the references on Ruby/Rails and it is all starting to make sense.

One of the presentations that Mike Pence recommended demonstrates building a web log engine in just 58 lines of code. There are two ways you can do that. You can have a development system with some darned powerful functionality, or you can play convoluted tricks that make your code really hard to follow. Ruby on Rails, I am pleased to say, takes the former approach. As Steve D commented back here, Rails isn’t just a database back end, it is an entire application framework system.

And if that doesn’t remind Delphi regulars of something, try the following quote from this article on the Ruby on Rails wiki.

Believe it or not, the majority of the time that programmers spend writing big web applications isn’t actually spent on the specifics of the program’s functionality, but instead it’s spent doing much more general programming—writing reusable pieces of code that can be called throughout the main application. These reusable components are collectively referred to as the program’s framework.

That should make it abundantly clear why the CodeGear folks are so interested.

Back at Mike Pence’s blog today there is news that CodeGear is considering a product for Ruby on Rails. That’s very nice, but who the heck is this Ruby anyway? Ruby Wax? Nope, she’d be more likely to want to be off the rails, I think. A song by Donald Fagen? A new teenage pop star? I figured it was about time I found out.

Ruby, it turns out, is a relatively new programming/scripting language creating by a smart-sounding Japanese guy known as “Matz” (Yukihiro Matsumoto). Quite why it is so wonderful isn’t immediately obvious, but it is object-based, designed to be readable, and it has a garbage collector. This is all good stuff.

The Rails part is the database connection. And now you can start to see the interest from CodeGear. You have a strong object-oriented language with a powerful database backend. What does that sound like?

So far so promising. I suspect I’ll still be using PHP for a while, if only because this is a Wordpress blog, but given the level of interest shown I’m going to spend some time taking a closer look at Ruby. The main downside I can think of right now is lack of hosting options. If I wanted to use it I suspect I’d have to switch hosts. (Heck, Pair, who are otherwise wonderful folks, haven’t even put PHP 5 on general release yet.)

But for now, over to you folks. Any Ruby evangelists out there care to make a pitch?