Ruby on Rails, AJAX & Web 2.0

I got a chance to attend my first ever SF Ruby Meetup. I was amazed by the overwhelming response and the turn out of the people attending this meetup. And the energy and enthusiasm which everyone brought with them was quite interesting to watch. Thanks to Bosco, the organizer of The San Francisco Ruby Meetup Group, for putting all this together. You can check out the highlights of the meeting here (Thanks Todd!).

In a nut shell it was very obvious with people, announcing that they are looking for Ruby/Ruby on Rails developers, that there is an increasing demand for Ruby & Ruby on Rails developers already. I’m not surprised with the success of Ruby, cause whatever has been happening with Java and J2EE isn’t something enlightening to look into. The tangent where Java development has gone can be explained into other alternatives which have been now around for sometime in past couple of years. But Java is still strong. But Ruby on Rails (RoR) is becoming popular. The ease and flexibility of RoR is something which is of a greater fascination then to be writing the entire piece of code yourself from scratch. Today’s development demands agility, pre-built components and modules, with plug-play fascination which gets the developer and the development really far. The unit tests functionality in RoR adds another set of value for the development time and cutting short that extra time.

The another buzzword which was getting its mention again and again was AJAX! And the very Web 2.0 appeal for websites! I also heard people talking about Laszlo, Flex, Ruby & Flash, and yes I did see Macs’ all around with occasional glimpse of PCs, and yes, I found one guy wearing ‘dojo‘ t-shirt! I was also amazed to hear startups and their new ventures in RoR, especially, two fresh Berkeley grads with their startup idea looking for RoR developers (!), and then a gaming startup which is already funded! Is the 90’s back now with a new name of ‘Ruby’ as oppose to Java! Don’t think so and none of us want that again. We’ll see all that in next year or so with RoR and its development. But overall it was a great experience for me and a lot of take home learning, of-course!

Technorati Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RoR, AJAX, Web 2.0, Java, J2EE, Laszlo, Flex, Flash, dojo, Berkeley