The Rails Way with 3rdRail - Introduction
Posted by lori, Thu Apr 10 20:00:00 UTC 2008
Originally, I was going to start with Chapter 1, but then I thought, what the hey, why not start right off with some criticism. Mild criticism, but criticism none the less.
In The Rails Way - Introduction, Obie goes out of his way to talk about Enterprise Adoption, and how well suited Rails is to improving the lot of the enterprise developer. I happen to agree. Having worked on a lot of projects, in a lot of enterprises, I have a good idea how much improvement, and it is significant.
On the other hand, Obie also goes out of his way to not-so-subtly snub Windows users. Given this pro-Enterprise, boo-Windows attitude, I'm going to guess that Obie didn't attend the Enterprise Rails BOF at RailsConf 2007. Actually, since I was there, I'm pretty sure I can say that he wasn't. That particular session sticks in my mind for two reasons. First, I was the one and only woman in the room (surprise, surprise). Second, and more significantly, I was the one and only Mac user in the room. This should not come as a surprise. Enterprise developers tend not to have a choice about their development platforms. Corporate policy, in all the large corporations where I have worked/consulted (Shell, IBM, Halliburton, IHS to name a few), dictates that there is one corporate computer flavor and that flavor is Microsoft Windows. Now, some of these enterprisey guys at the BOF had branched out, with VMWare installed, and were running Linux in order to do their Rails development, but frankly, that's a hack. If you are a developer, you want maximum power out of your development platform and tools, and running in a VM is unsatisfying. IMO, if Enterprise developers are going to make any impact on the numbers of Rails developers, it's likely to be as Windows users.
And this of course is where 3rdRail comes in. Right out of the box, 3rdRail comes ready to run on Mac, Linux and ... Windows. Delivering a fully operational Ruby/Rails environment, including database, 3rdRail enables enterprise developers to get the most out of their native development platform. Since most enterprise developers will also be IDE users of some persuasion, 3rdRail should be a familiar experience, especially for Eclipse users, because 3rdRail is based on Eclipse.