Ruby-related stories going across my radar keep making me say “ooh, that looks hot.”
First, check out Joyent Slingshot, which claims to bring offline function to Rails apps. I think this is sort of what Apollo is supposed to do, except Rails is really hard to beat on time-to-market and maintainability; so if the Joyent people got the offline machinery right, this could be a game-changer. Then there’s Mingle from Thoughtworks, described as “Agile IT project management”. I have a lot of time for both Joyent and Thoughtworks; having said that, there are grounds for caution in that many consulting-focused organizations have had trouble entering the products business.
Looking in a completely different direction, consider some jewels from the ever-prolific why the lucky stiff; I am particularly charmed by Stream Copy YouTube, Revver, Etc. and Random Number in a Feed (for Pipes Maybe?). Even if you’re not a Ruby enthusiast or even a computer programmer, trust me and follow one of those links; what’s at the other end is unique. If you are, look closely at _why’s code and you’ll learn a lot about Ruby and other useful things too.
Ruby may not actually be the be-all and end-all of programming languages. But right now, make no mistake, it’s a white-hot nexus of innovation. I’m honored (really) to have become a microscopic part of the community.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Andrew Shebanow (Mar 26 2007, at 10:51)
Tim: I also think SlingShot is very interesting, but I'm surprised you didn't have anything to say about their business/distribution model. I wasn't quite so circumspect, see my blog posting: http://blogs.adobe.com/shebanation/2007/03/apollo_competition_and_opennes.html
I'm not sure I agree with you about SlingShot being what "Apollo should have been" - from a security point of view, putting a general purpose app server on the desktop worries me quite a bit.
The comments from the Dekoh guys are also interesting.
Love to hear your take on these issues.
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From: Jemaleddin (Mar 26 2007, at 11:10)
I'm curious as to how Slingshot works - are they just storing the files that make up the rails app as text on your PC?
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From: David Young (Mar 27 2007, at 17:46)
@Andrew: first, thanks for the attention. We little guys always enjoy getting notice from the 800-lb gorilla. Second, the *only* thing Joyent has said is that Slingshot will be free to those that use Joyent Accelerators. We didn't say anything else, though.
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From: Frisino (Apr 02 2007, at 08:59)
Tim, writes "the white-hot nexus of innovation" .
This sound like a possible title for a Sun Ra album :)
Actually, just using this as a contrived opportunity for a belated comment on one of your earlier Sun Ra references. As one of the bigger Sun Ra enthusiasts in Sun Micro Inc, I was pleased to see Le Sonny Ra mentioned in a Sun blog.
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