Mike Bowler

I've been playing with Ruby on Rails recently and am very impressed with what I see. Rails is a web application framework built on top of the Ruby language. What makes this framework stand out is how easy it is to put together a simple web app. I was able to put together a simple page displaying data out of an existing database table in thirteen lines of code and most of those had to do with formatting html.

I started using Ruby back in 2000 and was one of the founding members of the Toronto Ruby Users Group. That particular group didn't last very long (there is a newer Toronto Ruby group running today but I'm not affiliated with them) and it seemed like Ruby wasn't going to get the critical adoption that it needed to take off.

I haven't paid a lot of attention to the Ruby community since that user group folded so I was very surprised to see how much has changed when I started looking into it recently.

The one thing that hadn't changed much is that the language hadn't achieved the critical numbers of developers to become of the mainstream languages but I think that's about to change very soon. I think Ruby is now at the tipping point and that Ruby on Rails may well be the thing that pushes it into the mainstream.

Additional links: This article on Rails published by the O'Reilly Network earlier this week.