DHH has brilliantly coalesced the last 15 years of MVC web practices into a Perfect Storm (Rails). He dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, mercifully allowing us to embalm the template-based MVC web design-strategy, put it into a glass coffin, and ship it off to the Smithsonian.
Here’s my Rails eulogy.
The first time I saw Rails—after doing Perl and PHP web development for a few years—my mind was blown: what would take me a week in Perl, or a day in PHP, could be done in 5 minutes with Rails. At the time I jokingly described Rails as crack for web developers. It’s so good, don’t even try it once!
Rails changed the way I do web development, and whenever I drop back down the evolutionary ladder to PHP, it’s like having dental surgery without anesthetics. Painful! All the repetitious tedium—building infrastructure, writing SQL, connecting to the database, the embedded language—was taken care by a the shiny Ruby black box. Rails is a web programmer’s deus ex machina.
“Don’t Repeat Yourself,” said DHH, and he lived up to his word. Rails nailed the door shut on Web 2.0.
Now that Rails has brought Web 2.0 to its end, can it do the same for Web 3.0? The answer is that Rails is no longer on the leading edge. Rails’ replacement has already dropped while you were trying to get a handle on Rails and Ruby. The new guy in town is Seaside.
Seaside arrived several years ago with little fanfare because it runs on Squeak, a relatively new version of Smalltalk. As you may know, Smalltalk is an “old” language that most of us have only heard the old-timers get sentimental about when they talk about the Good Old Days of the Computer Science Frontier.
It turns out that the Old is New again. It’s time to break camp and move on to the NeXT Level. You can get a head start on your friends (and foes) by checking out this ear-opening Floss interview with Seaside’s creator, Avi Bryant.
Hey, you don’t want to miss the Ground Floor again, do you? Give Seaside look.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I've barely gotten my feet wet and the ship's already sailed. The learning will never end!
In fact, Seaside predates Rails by more than 2 years ( http://www.seaside.st/about/history ): Avi and I made the first public release in early 2002.
Glad you're enjoying the framework. Smalltalk is indeed alive and well…