I was reading the 37Signals piece in Wired and noticed a reference to those eschewing Rails for, for instance, Merb as it was perceived to be more open to other the use of different components for (for example) AJAX and Object Relational Mapping.

I can understand that decision although I've always thought that the point of Rails was that it represents a 'blueprint' for building the sorts of applications that were prevalent, or gaining prevalence at the point that Rails was being constructed. So it's strength is in enabling the construction of those applications quickly.

But the world moves on. So will Rails become a legacy as quickly as it became a star? Is tomorrow's web scattered with 'Rails Relics' as the prevalent web paradigm shifts once more? Hmm...

I casually mentioned that learning new stuff - Ruby in this case - is sometimes a bit hard. So Huw challenged me to define what I found hard and maybe they could sort that out in their implementation of Sapphire.

I've been revisiting Ruby the past couple of weeks following a conversation with a colleague. (I spent some time learning Rails a couple of years ago to see what the furore was about). With the IronRuby and DynamicSilverlight efforts going on, it's probably Very Handy to know.

So, actually I found I struggled with some concepts much less than I did last time. The key issues for me had been:

• Symbols. Just found them a bit weird. This wasn't really a big deal. I suppose one of the issues here is that their use can depend on the individual coder rather than as a language practice so they can seem a bit intangible.
• Codeblocks. This is owing to them not being declared in the method signature (you can, but no-one does). You have to look for the yield keyword. On the other hand, recent practice with lambdas and so on in C# means that I understand the general subject a lot better now.
• Macros. How to achieve the Rails-y belongs_to :post type statements in the class was just a piece of knowledge I didn't have, but I now understand how to create these macros so another mystery is solved.

Overall then, I'm much more positive about my Ruby skill levels. One thing Huw mentioned was that you can make assertions about the expected arguments and their types in comments  for methods in the RubyInSteel IDE which appear as part of the intellisense capability. Now, I've owned the product for quite a while but of course I hadn't read the manual. This seems useful for a relative n00b like me - at least while learning.

I have a hard enough time with Ruby, though I'm trying really hard. Huw at SapphireSteel has just posted the first information about the Sapphire language they're developing for the .NET DLR. Hmm.

John points to the IronRuby source code drop here, and Scott Guthrie shows us a little of what we can do with it here.

I'm so pleased I'm on holiday this week!

More dynamic goodness - this time from QUT on their Ruby.NET compiler. The 0.7 release sees debugging support and Visual Studio 2005 integration.

"This includes syntax colouring, error highlighting, brace matching, hidden regions, Ruby.NET projects, project properties, project templates and project item templates. Ruby.NET projects (.rbproj) enable multiple Ruby source files to be compiled into a single .NET assembly."

Great stuff!

Technorati Tags: Ruby - .NET

I've done quite a lot of work with Silverlight over the past few months, and a lot with WPF prior to that, so a lot of the sessions at MIX were always likely to be stuff I know.

But I hadn't come into contact with the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) so I made sure that I attended the session by John Lam and Jim Huginin where they explained some details of the new support for dynamic languages.

Currently, the DLR supports 4 languages - JavaScript, Visual Basic, Ruby and Python - so there should be something for everyone.

(As an aside: as an ex-resident of the Isle of Dogs in London, I think that the DLR acronym which is the same as the Docklands Light Railway: my favourite automated monorail, is great!)

They showed a great demo of using all 4 languages and C# at the same time with a Silverlight 'interactive console' toy that Jim had created and were also mindful of the differences in language 'cultures' with some gentle ribbing of each others language preferences. The convention and formality of Python vs. the free love of Ruby...

I'll be exploring the possibilities of this in the coming weeks and hopefully have something interesting to say about it. Meantime, if you want to do the same, you can grab the bits from Codeplex.

Technorati Tags: Mix07 - Ruby - Python - DLR - Silverlight

Hmm, Ruby and .NET are obviously a hot topic for people... A couple of comments to the blog asked me if I'd seen Ruby.NET.

I have but one of the posts on John Lam's blog points to it, so I hadn't explicitly mentioned it. But it is here if you want to take a look. It's pretty exciting and can be used to compile Ruby into a compiled .NET assembly. Given it's capability I hadn't downloaded it but then thought 'why not'. After a few minutes, I began to see if I could load the various gems I have installed, but the -I option doesn't seem to support wildcards. A couple of searches later didn't turn up an answer BUT...

... it did turn up SapphireInSteel. Oh man, Ruby (and Rails) development within Visual Studio? Fantastic. The roadmap looks to include Intellisense in a couple of releases, but we'll see what happens. Meantime, I think it's a great use of the IDE. Amazing what turns up...

Oh, also on there is a great 'Little Book of Ruby' if you don't know the language but want a quick guide - seems very useful.