Ruby and Rails
Creative Commons License photo credit: Berberich

When I started working for Digimedia we decided that a lot of our projects were going to be done in rails. I had never used ruby at that point and rails and frameworks in general were just starting to gain popularity. So I was a bit skeptical about the benifits of learning a new language all over again. At that point the majority of web coding was done in php or asp and I had many years of experience in both.

Well I’m glad that I did learn ruby and the rails framework. Things that would take a while coding in php and asp, I could knock out in minutes in rails. Not only that but I really do prefer the syntax of ruby now. I still use php for a lot of simple things, but if it will need a database, rails is where I look first.

I’ve even gotten as far as writing some of my own plugins, and forking some others to add more functionality. The open source environment with ruby is outstanding.