I received the Programming Ruby book yesterday and today I received an email from Dave Thomas that our Agile Web Development with Rails has been shipped so I should be getting that one next week sometime. Are we drinking the Rails kool-aid? I would say that we are not but I certainly think there is a place for it in the enterprise. Will it replace PHP, Perl, Java or X technology? I don’t think RoR will take over these technologies but some projects will be a perfect fit for this dynamic language.

Since I don’t want to just believe the hype around RoR, I would like to put a small application together and get a first hand look at the framework. However, RoR is not the only framework getting some attention these days. Model-Glue has been picking up fans as well among the ColdFusion community. There are some PHP frameworks that are also gaining some steam by riding the AJAX train and applying some lessons taken from the Rails camp. So, I would like to put a sample application and port it across these frameworks as a learning experience.

I would also like to become more familiar with these frameworks. I have found the organization they provide, a key factor in getting a stronger grip on the whole object oriented programing paradigm. However, the regular semester starts in less than a week so our experiment will take a short delay before we get into any development. This might be a good time to get some of the design decisions made and look a little more into Cake (a PHP framework) and get some reading done on the Ruby book.