Sivers hits the Rails
I’ve read quite a few posts about Ruby on Rails lately, just letting my brain skid over them since nobody ever said anything that made it sound like it was actually of interest to me. Then Daniel pointed out that Derek Sivers is rewriting CDBaby in Ruby on Rails. Wups, time to pay attention.
If you don’t know CDBaby, well, you should. It’s a wonderful independent music store, selling everything from Girlyman to Paul Kamm and Eleanore MacDonald to Scott Andrew to my old friend Fred Steffen (well, and in truth, a lot of non-folk genres I don’t listen to, too). The sister operation, HostBaby, which hosts websites for musicians, was the first commercial site I can remember seeing with the balls to serve application/xhtml+xml. When Derek talks, I listen.
Oh … oh … oh … and here I was just getting somewhat proficient with mySQL and PHP. Derek reminds me of a friend from long ago who would announce he’d found a great new language (at the time it was ’C’) and would be re-writing all our applications. I dreaded it. Which means I’ll probably write my first line of ’Ruby’ in 2019.
I first learned about Rails from the guys at 37Signals, who used it (with David Heinemeyer Hannson, creator of Rails) to program Basecamp. It always seemed like an elegant language, but I’ve been spending so much time in PHP and other stuff lately that I haven’t had time to learn it yet.
This certainly provides some motivation. I’m seeing Rails pop up in more and more apps.