When the Ruby on Rails framework was first introduced a few years ago, nothing helped put it on the map more than the now famous “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” screencast. In it, Rails originator David Heinemeier Hansson created a blogging engine using Rails in just 15 minutes. That demonstration was so powerful that it helped launch Rails into a major framework in the web development world, one for which programmers remain in demand for high paying jobs.
The demonstration was such a hit, that a number of other web frameworks emulated the Rails screencast and released their own versions. Akelos, CakePHP, CodeIgniter and others have released screencasts inspired by the original Rails video.
Recently, Hansson’s influential screencast received an update for Rails 2.2. The new screencast was produced by Ryan Bates of Railscasts, which puts out free Rails tutorial screencasts every week. In addition to the better production values that Bates brings, the new screencast has been ratcheted up a few notches by creating a blogging application that include commenting, RSS feeds, an API, an admin interface, AJAX, and more in just 15 minutes.
The new screencast might actually be a bit too fast and cram in too much information for it to be very useful as a learning aid (of course, that really depends on how fast you synthesize information and your individual learning style). But it definitely raises the bar in terms of showing the beauty of the Rails framework in a quick and easy to digest format.
The official screencast page also links the two previous Rails blog screencasts, created for version 0.5 and 1.0 of the framework, for those interested in seeing how the framework has changed over the year.
Note: Be sure to check out SitePoint’s own web development training videos too!
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It’s really a shame that they didn’t release the source code with the screencast; it’d be a lot easier to follow along.
November 30th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
RoR is like Apple – Instead of focusing on making their crap better (My IPhone 3G crashes every day multiple times), they focus only on trying to dis the competition. Do I need to remind everyone that Microsoft has been, and probably will always be more successful than Apple, which is why Bill Gates is the riches man in the world.
Another thing they do that is FAIL is making people want to work with them. The IPhone’s AppStore is the exception, and it is only because of consumers that the AppStore is successful. A
December 1st, 2008 at 3:03 pm
To respond to orokusaki’s comment… The Rails community as a whole doesn’t dis the competition because they look at it from the perspective that the productivity gains that the Rails framework provides gives them a competitive advantage. If the Ruby language and ORM systems like ActiveRecord didn’t attract developers, then way is Microsoft spending so much time working on IronRuby and building their updated .NET MVC – which in my option is very Rails like. CakePHP, Symfony, and all the other various frameworks out there are trying to achieve a similar productivity benefit that Ruby/Rails developers are seeing – because it makes developers happier. Your comment that they aren’t making their product better is just ridiculous… With Rails 2.2 introducing i18n support out of the box, threadsafety, ActiveRecord connection pooling, and improved Ruby 1.9 and JRuby support I can only guess that you are just posting your comment to find something to complain about. This Rails screencast is an awesome improvement over the previous. It touches on topics like TDD, RJS, and shows some of the great benefits of the console. Rails isn’t for everyone, but for those of you that are interested in it… this is a great 15 minutes to spend.
December 1st, 2008 at 7:18 pm
@orokusaki:
Even though I am not such a big fan of Rails as some are, I would say that you are not right on this one. I do think, that they focus on making their stuff work.
True, but this does in no way say anything about quality. A lot of Microsoft products are crap, and only have success due to market dominance in formats of data documents and great marketing.
A true indicator on that Rails have done a lot of stuff right, is how nearly every framework and platform has been mimicking them since they became huge. And projects like Grails might even have done a better implementation. They sure did it on a better platform :-)
Said Tech Per
December 1st, 2008 at 8:41 pm