{ :from => Delhi, :about => everything }

Ok, so we had been shouting ourselves hoarse, claiming that Rails is all about developer productivity and joy. So is that all about it?, huh!, was the normal reaction. But isn’t that a big enough reason. Not for many people though.

Yes, we accept that there are some pain points, like hosting Rails applications at shared hosts. No we don’t need those in production, but don’t you wish it was easier to deploy a rails app for a quick review with a client (a client who can’t run it on his own machine). Yes php scores there, just throw the code on the server and you are done. Why do I still run this blog on wordpress and not typo or mephisto? The big reason is that it’s easy to let just apache handle everything.

But things might change soon with the launch of passenger aka modrails.

And the other classic allegation against Rails has been performance. Remember the discussion between JDD and DHH about CPU cycles vs. developer cycles. We are definitely headed in the direction of lesser CPU cycles for our Rails app. Rails2 made some advances towards that and with Ruby1.9 and YARV and Rubinium, we have high expectations. Also you have heard about Ruby Enterprise Edition , haven’t you?

So things might change, when people try to figure out the fastest web language or framwework , the next time around.

I and those around me here, are generally biased towards rails. Ruby makes us happy. For us the pleasure points in Rails were always far more than the pain points. The basic Rails principles of DRY and Convention Over Configuration clicked with us. Ruby’s and Rail’s simplicity and beauty clicked with us. We did not need hosting on shared hosts. We could work with Rails caching to improve performance. No wonder we were one of the early adopters of Rails in India. But today, I would like to thank the critics whose untiring rants have moved Rails in the direction of being much more than what is was a couple of years ago.

Some of those changes have been in rails, but more have been around it. If you would have noticed, most of these development are not in rails as such, but in the ruby ecosystem.

Rails provides developer productivity and joy; ease of deployment; and ever-improving performance. And no, now you don’t need to go back to Java. We knew it, I am just repeating it for you.

Extrapolate this one year old graph for yourself.

So what is your reason for not having rail-ed yet?

Update: Charles Nutter has a post on upcoming Ruby implementations here

Tags: ruby on rails, rails

The second delhi.rb meetup was organized at VinSol on Thursday, 19th July, 2007. It was attended by 11 rails enthusiasts.
I gave an introduction to Full Text Search and Solr. And then gave a demo of acts_as_solr plugin. Seems it was well received by all.

Sur, then presented Advanced Ruby, with a lot of live code. Everybody was amazed at what all ruby has to offer for metaprogramming. Infact the talk inspired more people to write plugins. I definitely know of one which is being written and will post about it as soon as it’s released.

Here’s a pic from the meetup, very interesting titled by Sur as Manik with MAC.

It was a great evening. Looking forward to more of these.

update: Sur just blogged about the meetup here

Here’s the flicker photopool for the event.

Tags: delhi.rb, delhi ruby meetup

PuneRuby Guru Satish Talim recently posted about Companies in India he would recommend for Rails development. Vinsol is mentioned among the companies he recommends in his post.

Obviously makes me feel proud.

Thanks Satish.

Tags: ruby on rails india

Satish Talim, the man behind PuneRuby has created a site to help learn ruby.
The site is based on the notes that he had prepared while learning ruby.
The site is here .. Learning Ruby

The bonus offer is that Satish will answer all your Ruby questions, for Free!

Tags: ruby, ruby in india

Believe me! The scene is much hotter than what I had anticipated a few months back.

Good to see so many companies and developers jumping ( or wanting to jump) onto Rails/Ruby from other frameworks and languages.
This means increased competition for us. But it could also be consolidation time for the small agile Rails teams in this area to join hands to increase their offering.

Talking about demand; yesterday, I received a job offer from a “Big Indian Outsourcing company”.
The lady who called me read this blog, but probably didn’t read “technopreneur” written on the top.
So when I told her that I was running a company myself, there was dead silence for a couple of seconds.
Then she asked me, if I could give references of any Rails programmers.

I told her that If I came across good people, I’ll hire them and I’ll pass on the others to her.
Fair enough. Right!

Tags: railsindia, rails, ruby, rails in india, ruby on rails

I travelled to Colombo last week to train a team of web programmers on Ruby on Rails.

God! I had never imagined, I would be training people on rails in Colombo.

The web programming team at Providence Networks and Solutions was great. They were very good at php and Java, and it seemed like they enjoyed the Rails training a lot.
Thanks to Ajay at ITVidya for connecting me and Providence.

A couple of observations about Colombo, unrelated to the training
1. Inspite of the communal/political probem, Sri Lanka is doing well. The airport is the first impression of any city, Colombo airport was sparkling clean and the immigration staff was very friendly too. The duty free shops were much better than ours, carried much more stock than our new “flamingos” and the staff was friendlier too.
2. The streets were neat and there were no animals or Rickshaws. I thought I would find them in all developing countries. Or do we have too much of them in Indian cities.
3. They have a well implemented parking policy in Colombo. It is not like the haphazard way of sadi-dilli. It’s probably a good suggestion to ask our politicians to stop visiting London, Singapore and Tokyo and rather look around nearby to learn how to implement urban policies.

And for the business minded, there are a good number of developers available at much lesser cost there, and they all speak English too. So you know you have an option available for your next offshore team.

It was a good trip and I look forward to visiting Colombo again. :)

Tags: rails, colombo