Jake On Rails
You'd be forgiven for thinking (maybe even relieved that) I'd lost interest in Ruby on Rails. Au contraire. Not at all. I don't have the time at the moment to keep learning at the same pace but I am still avidly tuned to the news and grapevine.
This week they've released Rails 1.1, with an amazing new addition called RJS.
So, off I went and upgraded my server. Yes, my very own Rails server now lives at rails.codestore.net. It's a dedicated Linux server hosted here in the UK, which came ready-built as a LAMP server. After a lesson in command lines and vi I managed to install Ruby, Rails and FastCGI. It now runs PHP and Rails sites side-by-side. I treated myself to a new domain jakeonrails.co.uk and started a Typo-based blog there, just for the hell of it.
One thing you all noticed about my original Journal rails demo was that it was slow. This was a hosting problem. Now I have my own server it's like lightning. Visit rails.codestore.net now and you see a newer faster version. I've added login and registration along with some other bits. It was so, so easy.
I downloaded a trial copy of Camtasia as discussed. Hopefully, before the 30 days is up (in 3 day's tme), I'll manage to do that comparison video of creating a simple app in Rails and Domino.
Why bother with Rails? Because I like what I see. No, I love it. It makes web development fun! I want to enjoy what I do. While I enjoy web development in general, using Domino as the tool only mires that enjoyment.
I've listened to a few talks given by David Heinemeier Hansson (or DHH as he's refered to) and he talks about the same things. He came up with the idea for Rails because he wanted to write beautiful code and have fun doing it. Last night I watched this interview with him. It's worth watching just to hear what he says about scalability.
Skip to the 
You can subscribe to an individual
Once your Camtasia trial has expired you can switch to demo studio: {Link} It has much less features (no editing capabilities) but should be sufficient for a simple screencam.
:-) stw
What about Puakma? Why Ruby on Rails now? Or am I comparing apples to oranges?
Now I have to decide which to use as an alternative to domino! Or should I just learn standard LAMP development first?
-dave
Dave. The differences between RoR and Puakma are both huge and (to a degree) obvious. Why the change of focus for me? Not sure. Puakma was a welcome change to Domino when Brendon first showed it to me. It's still an amazing tool and fun to use. However, it's market share is about 0.000...0000.1%. RoR has much more chance of becoming something you could reasonably expect ot make a living at doing.
You can't go wrong learning LAMP, although if it's your first venture in to web dev outside of Domino I'd actually suggest using RoR for a while first, just to get a feel for this way of coding and buidling database structures.
Stephan (and Jake, of course), I don't know about DemoStudio (the link does not work for me right now), but CamStudio {Link} for sure is a great program for doing screen cams. No editing capabilities as well, though.
Just to jump on the screencam recommendation bandwagon... I've been using Wink for a while, and it's worked quite well -- {Link} . It's free, and it runs on both Windows and Linux.
Hey Jake on the LAMP front I would recommend having a look at CodeIgniter - {Link} its a simple PHP framework along the same lines as Rails.
Its not as powerful as Rails but on the other hand its not so complicated to learn, particularly if your new to MVC and non Domino web development - not that this applies to you ;-)
Great Julian! Wink reminds me a lot of ViewletBuilder. Except, that it is free! Even better if you don't really need a video, but rather a presentation.
Have not made it into the Rails thing, but Ruby looks like an accessible programming language. Especially all my "personal friends" who never got tired to launch their "great" anti-Java arguments like:
- "guru stuff"
- "too complicated"
- "marfil tower/academical"
- "you need an army of 100 people for the coding, 200 for administration and 140 for the database what our great Domino department with 4 person and a dog acomplishes in same amount of time".
You might take a look @Ruby.
Sooner or later IBM will support any thing open soursee.
Axel