I like to keep an open ear for new technologies coming out, especially in the software development arena. One new item that a lot of people are raving about is Ruby on Rails (RoR). So, I decided to check it out.

I found out that it's made by a bunch of Mac users. As most computer professionals know, Mac users all fall into one of two categories. The first (and larger) category is grandparents that can't type much less use a computer. This is the group that believes having more than one button on your mouse is far to confusing.

The second group are the elitist non-conformists. This is the group that believes it is more trendy and cooler than every one else. This group buys into the idea that owning a Mac somehow makes you more special and accepted into a cult community of arrogant elite users and ultra-hip cool guys.

Well, the Ruby community is in the second group and keeping that stereotype alive and well. To be fair, RoR is a pretty neat framework with some awesome features that other frameworks just don't have. You can roughly accomplish the same stuff with .Net or Java but you would have to combine several third party libraries and code generators to do it. RoR is a sweet little package that gains all of its efficiencies from one central theme ... convention over configuration. What this means is that RoR has already made most of the design decisions you will ever need to make for your application for you. You will build database powered web applications with RESTful interfaces that implement a CRUD interface using the Model-View-Controller pattern. You will use ActiveRecord, and the other framework-provided base classes. If you don't do this, then your application is, according to the RoR mantra, wrong and stupid.

The RoR founder, DHH, came right out and said that they are not interested in any new innovations from other languages, but will impose their conventions on everyone else.

All in all, I am a little put off by the whole idea that I have to join the movement or I am not really a RoR developer. But, what do you expect from a Mac user?