Ruby on Rails: The art of simplicity

Hi there, my name is Myles Eftos and I’m your new Ruby on Rails blogger! I’ve been hacking rails for almost two years now, building a number of online apps, such as my time tracking system: 88 Miles. I am constantly pushing for that Rails-zen state, that harmonious balance between simply beautiful code and powerful functionality.

For those of you yet to be bitten by the Rails bug, it is as close to web development heaven you are going to get (Yes, I’m a bit of a Rails-fan boy – you have been warned). I have worked professionally on just about every web platform out there, and Rails is by far my favourite – things that take hours in PHP take minutes in Rails. The completely self-contained development environment, built in database migrations and deployment system means that you can get a Rails application out the door before some of the other guys have finished setting up their XML configuration files.

The soon-to-be released version 2.0 of Ruby on Rails will once again re-enforce the simplicity and power of the framework with a number of improvements that will make the lives of the humble web developer just that little bit easier. Serving up different versions of pages for different devices is a piece of cake with the new multi-view features, the security model has been improved and fancy new controller based exception handlers make ugly nested if statements a thing of the past.

I am going to try and present a good spread of topics throughout this blog with everything from beginner topics to more advanced bleeding edge techniques, but this ultimately will be driven by you. Please ask any questions you may have and I will do my best to answer them. I’m also lurking around the sitepoint forums waiting to pounce on any Ruby on Rails questions.