Ruby on Rails demo

Yesterday I gave my co-workers a lunch time presentation about Ruby on Rails. Since these guys haven't even seen Ruby, never mind Rails, I kept it pretty basic and loosely based it on DHH's build-a-blog-in-15-minutes screencast at RubyOnRails.org. I coded live and in person and even the mistakes I made were good because they highlighted not only Rails' good error reporting but also the quick edit-and-refresh-the-browser style of coding. No Ant scripts, no compiling, no restarting the app server, no waiting for the VM, etc.

In the end I think I made the impact I wanted. I showed people some other ways of developing web applications that are fundamentally more productive than the endless configuration hell we Java developers tend to work in. Unfortunately, I also heard unfortunate statements like "that's cool but we're a Java shop and we'd never be able to deploy something like that". While that was disappointing, I kept my composure and plugged JRuby as a possible future solution (I can't wait to be able to a build a Rails app into a WAR and deploy it in WebLogic).

I planted the seed. Now all I have to do is continue to nurture the idea of Rails development, continue the education and hope for a brighter future.