I am not a web developer. Considering how much time we all spend online I believe that web design is an important part of techlife, however I still think application and (especially) systems development are the 'real' programming venues. I am, however, a heavyweight surfer so I do come along quite a few interesting websites that involve some pretty impressive technologies and design ideas. I love the fact that these things are now easier to get going for anyone that has at least a little bit of a technically-inclined mind.

Enter Ruby on Rails. I know, I know, old technology already. Regardless, I got into it a bit over the last few days and I must say, it makes for some pretty kick-ass, easy implementations. Once you learn the pluralization rules - seeing how RoR heavily relies on this - rolling out a simple application is a walk in the park. The LoC count is always very low, a lot of the tasks are automated through scripts - even creating database tables - and the most work that you have to do is in the views, which are generally rhtml files.

To this we add some kick-ass AJAX stuff and CSS layouts and we have a pretty interesting application ready to roll out. I have a few non-revolutionary ideas of my own (blog or forum suite) to help me further practice all this technology. Why do I want to do that if I think applications are the way to go? All of these are interfaces to databases. I believe having multiple ways of consistently accessing the same information is advantageous to all parties involved, usability-wise. It is also a way to encourage data structure standards, i.e. having ways in which all forums could be aggregated into one application (this is an echo of the HiJack idea passed around during MyDreamApp.com) by means of a standard fashion in which data is organized.

Labels: geek, technology