So yesterday I had all the good intentions of getting a mail daemon working on my server that is until the buzz over Ajax finally reached a pitch that I couldn’t ignore so I did what any ADD rattled person would do and drop the original task and look into the bright shiny new one. Well, that isn’t entirely true. At work we are continuing to feel the budgetary squeeze and we have been developing fairly limp applications using classic ASP and a god-awful amount of code; .NET is fiscally out of reach even though we are a 100% Microsoft shop so the last several months have seen the grumbling, “There has to be an easier way.” So enter the buzz about Ajax which gives me a kick towards Ruby on Rails, which bills itself as:

Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.

My entire experience with Ruby has centered around troubleshooting my installs of Alexandria and this is the first mention I have seen of Rails; let’s just say that I live under a rock and cannot hang out with the cool developers. However, setting it up was a snap. Using VMWare, I built another image of Ubuntu and configured MySQL, PHP4, Apache2, Ruby 1.8, and Rails all within an hour and was knee-deep in the introductory tutorial shortly thereafter. So far I am impressed with the API and how quick it is to bang together a working application. Once I wrap up the tutorial today I’m going to look at porting some of our simpler applications, like time management, to get a feel for development time and code complexity.