[Slightly OT] - Of Ajax, Ruby on Rails, and 37 Signals

[Rodney Somerstein]

>But I keep wondering why this stuff isn't being driven by Rev 
>instead of by Ruby, which is a text-only development tool.


Easy. Ruby on Rails is free and open source. Much easier to get the 
developer nerds of the world excited about something that makes their 
life easier and is free than a commercial product.

That's just a fact of life. Similar reasons for why Python is much 
more popular than Rev. It isn't a matter of capabilities and ease of 
use. It's a matter of what is easily available, known, and free also 
helps.

Of course, the fact that text-based environments lend themselves to 
team development projects much better than Rev probably also helps. 
The fact that only one person can work on a Rev stack at a time is a 
big downside to trying to use Rev for projects that take more than 
one person. I know that everyone could work on their own stack and 
have it call other stacks, but due to the interactive nature of stack 
development, this just doesn't feel as clean as working on a source 
file, submitting it to a source control system, then having someone 
build it for testing.

Not to mention the fact that Ajax, which the article says Ruby on 
Rails gives easy access to, utilizes existing web technologies such 
as JavaScript. This is instead of requiring developers to scrap 
everything they already know to switch to Rev. Instead the developers 
just learn one more environment that fits seamlessly into their 
existing development process.

I really like Rev, but unfortunately there are some environments that 
it doesn't fit into as well as more traditional languages. It has a 
huge learning curve compared to more traditional environments. For 
one person projects or a very small team working closely together, 
Rev can be a better environment to work in. But it requires a major 
shift in mind set from most other languages/development environments. 
It requires depending on RunRev to add features/bug fixes, and it is 
a commercial product.

All of that being said, as a person who programs for a hobby, rather 
than for a living, I enjoy working with Rev more than the other 
languages/environments than I have looked at. Revolution definitely 
has its place and can help me finish projects much more easily than 
other environments. But, I come from a HyperCard background (at one 
point when working in evangelism at Apple, I was responsible for 
dealing with both HyperCard and Applescript as well as other 
development environments and I was the lead for a fee-based scripting 
support group at Apple). This has made understanding how to use 
Revolution much easier, but I still struggle a lot with how to do 
some seemingly simple things easily and efficiently.

Sorry about the extended rant, but you did ask. ;-)

-Rodney