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having no knowledge of Ruby on Rails, I'll probably skip it.  Though seeing what people do in a day might inspire me to learn something about it!

Ruby alone is the most kick ass language I've encountered. I haven't gotten into Rails yet, but Ruby makes me want to do kinky things to my computer.

Ok, I am sold.  RoR is the bomb. 

Built my first web app with it today.  Very little coding to build a robust tool.  (It was a chess score-board/tracking.)  Damn.  RoR has so much built in and it just handles all the common stuff.  It makes PHP look like Perl in comparison.

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We have our app pretty planned out.  Figured out what each we are going to do and roughed out on paper.  We are ready to go.

Gipetto wrote:

Tell me! Tell me!

Me too.

Although I'll probably look into it myself a little bit deeper later this summer...

but I am intrigued... anything that makes 'PHP look like Perl' is something that could likely [booming voice]take over the world[/booming voice] in not too long. Especially with the learning curve being as gracious as it appears to possibly be...

The syntax is different.  No semicolons, no curly braces (at least for control structures)  no $ for strings.

Also conceptually you work on a higher level.  You deal with how the data relates rather than building queries and loops.  For example in the first app that we built, the match (the results of chess games)  You just define the model like this:

class Match < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_and_belongs_to_many :players
    belongs_to :winner, :foreign_key => "winner_id", :class_name => "Player"
end

So cool.

There is a views folder.  It will generate any that you don't define specifically.  You build .rhtml files.  They are a cross between smarty/php.   

The whole thing is more abstracted than the normal way you build a site.  You have your objects which just display by pointing to them in the url.  In the example we built, there is a player class which is also the table in the database.  By pointing to "http://sitename.com/player"  and it will display a table of the content.   This of course can be modified.  Pointing to "http://sitename.com/player/new" displays a form to create a new player.   New, edit and destroy are built in.  You don't have to create the pages or the medthod to read the url.  It is an application with scripts.

I may not be explaining it well (or even correctly).  Yesterday was my first day with it. 

But is not the traditional "pages" and "includes" method.  You deal directly with what happens and the data.  But yes, templates are part of it and they are very powerful.

I looked at it in like January. I (don't believe) it's on my host, so I'm only but so interested, but maybe it's time to fire it up on the powerbook and take a look.

3 hours in...
Most web services are in place...
registration and authentication in place...
base layout/css are place...

Working late at night on a Friday? Jeepers man.

Last stages... 5 hours left.
Refining interface and testing/bughunting.

Scott wrote:

CSS is my enemy.

You should use tables instead of CSS.

why limit yourself to just one?  use tables and frames!