Quick Update

DHH is celebrating two years of Rails. I'd like to thank him. I'm sure most people reading this would agree that Rails has probably made the life of a web-developer much better. A quiet satisfaction at things I've written using it. Spending time to make sure it is done right, rather than rushing to have something, anything, to show to the customer. names = People.find(:all).collect { |person| person.name }. I know, that last one was Smalltalk. I still love those Smalltalk collections.

The reason for the lack of any posts recently are three-fold. One it was recently mine, and my dad's birthday. It was his 60th so I've been away for a while. And it's been very hot for England (in the thirties/nineties depending upon whether you are metric/imperial). Two, I've also been very very busy at work. Mainly Rails stuff (don't tell the boss) with some deployments coming up soon. So I'm preparing to try out RForward in a live environment, probably with Mongrel (sorry Tim, I promise I'll try and get to the bottom of your problem as well). Thirdly, we have had a reorganisation at work and my job is changing to one of writing functional specifications and handling product roadmaps. I'm not too bothered about that - I like writing and I like to think I'm good at it. I won't miss programming in .Net. I won't miss programming in Delphi. I'm not allowed to use Rails (even though I still do as I get more done). However, the stupidity of the Rails decision, in the face of rational, well-thought out arguments (well, I thought they were rational and well-thought out but I could be wrong) has made me want to do something else with my life. I've got some plans. They involve Rails. They also involve a fair amount of PHP (as I will need to leverage some open source). They definitely will not involve .Net, IIS or Sql Server. But I don't know how long they will take to reach fruition. So there will be more RForward to come. Just not forever.