Computer programming is just as much a creative endeavor as a mathematical or scientific one.

This article came at the right time for me.

We held our Web Developer Makover class back in January, which was open to everyone new to Rails but especially geared for Microsoft developers. At the class, we told everyone who came that the best way to really learn Rails is to develop your own site and launch it, no matter how large or small the site might be. Today I'm happy to announce that Scott Stawarz has launched his own site!

From his email to me:

What do you get when a Java Developer (my brother) and a Microsoft Developer (me) decide to build a web application together:

You get a Rails application: http://www.simpleweight.com/

Simpleweight is a weight management tool. We say weight management is as simple as Food In = Food Out, and you can not change what you don't measure. So, we created simpleweight to help us measure and track our weight management goals.

Check it out!

A Java guy and a Microsoft guy using Rails... almost brings a tear of joy to my eye. So if you're out there wondering how you could build and launch your first web application, do what Scott did - think of something you're passionate about, and then just do it.

David A. Black has opened registration for an "Intro through Intermediate" Ruby on Rails course. David is one of the best Ruby and Rails instructors in the galaxy. David's "Ruby for Rails" book was one of the first Rails books I bought that actually made be better at both Ruby and Rails programming.

Plus, he's always been active on the Ruby mailing list, and always patient and polite even when someone posts a question like "How do I loop through an array in Ruby" for the umpteenth time - and that counts for a lot in my book.

So if you want to get good at both Ruby and Rails, and probably get to meet some cool people to boot, check it out.

First, a little background for those of you who haven't been following along.

When Jeff and I decided to start this blog of ours way back in the summer of '05, we figured very few people would care. We were (maybe still are) two clueless .NET developers experimenting with this newfangled thing called Ruby on Rails. In addition to our cluelessness, most of the demos and tutorials out there were built using OS X or Linux, and most other folks working with Rails were from the Java or PHP community. In other words, there wasn't much help out there for guys like us.

Today, things are changing. Rails is slowly making its way into widespread acknowledgment, if not adoption, by many in the software development community. More than a few of our friends in the Microsoft development community are discovering (and loving) it. And of course, Jeff and I are both now working with Rails full-time.

Recently, I was thrilled to see that Mike Gunderloy (of Larkware fame) is taking a shot at leaving Microsoft-centric development behind in favor of open-source technologies, particularly Rails. Mike is a long-time, well-respected member of the Microsoft community and is the author of one of my favorite .NET development books, Coder to Developer. By the looks of it, he seems to be enjoying Rails quite a bit and is also making the switch to OS X. A recent post from his new, anything-but-Microsoft blog, A Fresh Cup:

James Higgs is the latest developer I’ve seen to publicly express a dissatisfaction with working in the Microsoft ecosystem. In his blog entry A change in my digital life he links back to this blog as well, which makes me either an inspiration or a bad influence (or perhaps a little of both). I’m starting to think it’s time for a support group, or at least a mailing list.

Time for a support group, indeed. So, we thought we'd make a go at it with our new forum. Go ahead, stop on by, and ask those burning questions about developing Rails on Windows, making the switch to Mac, and that sorta thing. We're here to help.

At our recent workshop, I promised that I'd send out a bunch of useful links to everyone who attended. Because they might be interesting to others who didn't attend (but really because I'm just plain lazy), I thought I'd just post them here instead. So, here is my not-so-comprehensive list of Rails blogs and resources for Rails on Windows. And, since we didn't dive too deep into RESTful Rails in class, I've included some links to get you going with it.

RESTful Rails

• DHH's RailsConf 2006 Keynote
• Rick Olson's Beast forum app - great example
• RESTful Rails Peepcode
• Trotter Cashion's nyc.rb CRUD presentation

Ruby/Rails on Windows

• Deployment Strategies for Rails on Windows
• Ruby on Rails For IIS/Fast-CGI
• Mongrel on Win32 HOWTO

Must-Read Blogs

• Amy Hoy - Rails from a designer's perspective
• Err the Blog - Mostly advanced stuff, but a must-read if you can keep up
• Josh Susser - ActiveRecord guru
• Geoffrey Grossenbach - General Rails goodness
• Peter Cooper - Chock full of information and links
• Ryan Daigle - Stay up-to-date on new features in Edge Rails
• Riding Rails - The official Rails weblog
• The Rails Way - In-depth dissection and improvements to real-life Rails apps
• Jamis Buck - Ruby mastermind and Rails core team member

And here it is in OPML, for the truly lazy.

I just wanted to mention the latest Ruby on Rails podcast, in which Obie Fernandez is the guest interviewer in a visit to the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. Although the sound environment is a bit distracting at the start (Obie, please don't interview people in clubs anymore), the content is great.

Many of the members of the Brigade are .NET developers that are also using Rails. At RailsConf 2006, Brian and I had the pleasure of meeting Casper Fabricious in person. At that time he mentioned something about getting a local Ruby group together, and it's great to see how it's come together. Casper is a great guy and really smart. Working on .NET during the day and Rails at night (sound familiar?), he and the other guys at the CRB are helping spread the word of Rails to the companies they work with. Unfortunately Caspar was not included in the podcast, but the other guys who were interviewed did a great job and had insightful things to say about making the transition from .NET to Rails at your workplace.

In this podcast they talk about Rails vs. .NET, and the difference it makes in their work. Oh, and these guys aren't just using Rails, they're actively giving back to the community with plugins and trying to write code that can be incorporated into core. So definitely give it a listen to get a perspective on the impact Rails is having on existing .NET shops there.

What a great weekend! We got together with 20 great people to learn Rails together this past Saturday, and Brian and I had a good time. And I'm really glad to say that it seems everyone else also had a good time, too.

We're going to follow up with a more substantial post this week, but I wanted to give an immediate thank-you to Michael Leung for being willing to help us out. Everyone's PC is a little different, and troubleshooting a few problems with Ruby and/or Rails and/or MySQL on Windows would have been hard work for us without his help. Michael has given a lot to the Rails on Windows community. Although Michael isn't actively coding on RideMe anymore, he's still donating time and resources to keep it going. The inevitable question of IDEs came up during our class, and I hope everyone will take a look at RideMe (and even better, contributing to it, if you know C#). Michael is an excellent Rails developer, and it was reassuring to have him there and to keep us honest. :-)

Just a few quick observations about the class:

• Although advertised as a class for former Microsoft developers who want to learn about Rails on Windows, several very cool-looking Macs showed up. Which we thought was great. We demonstrated Ruby and Rails on Windows Vista, Windows XP running inside Parallels on a Mac, and then on the Mac itself, to show that you can develop your Rails apps on either operating system (and we do). (Brian develops mostly on his awesome MacBookPro these days; I use an iMac at my new day-time Rails job, and I use Windows XP for Rails development when I'm at home.)

• I was especially happy to see how many attendees had never developed a Web site by themselves before in any programming language. I hadn't either before I learned Rails. I had been a client software developer my whole career (C/C++/C#). My attempts at ASP (and later ASP.NET) just depressed me...writing my own ORM later each time was just the worst. Last year Rails opened up a new world of programming joy to me, and I'm so glad we had a chance to spread the good news of Rails to these folks.

• Everyone who came was nice! I don't know what it is, but the Ruby community just seems to attract nice people. No heckling the entire day, and no fruit was thrown (ok, I admit, I thought about throwing selected items lunch buffet at Brian at one point, but I resisted the urge.)

• A surprising number of people were from out of town. I remember people saying they were from Seattle, Florida, Memphis, and New York (and I bet I'm forgetting about a couple others).

Thanks again to all who came. And for those who couldn't attend this time around, we hope to see you next time.

The Rails on Windows folks of the world can now have some of the same shorthand goodness you see in all those nifty screencasts, thanks to Dr. Nic. The good Doc has ported TextMate's snippet libraries over to RadRails. Ok, it's still not the same as TextMate. But you can have it now, and it's $3000 cheaper. So check it out.

If you haven't given Mephisto a try, I'd highly recommend it. It's fast, lightweight, and more intuitive than Typo, at least to me. And getting Softies on Rails converted over from Typo was a breeze. The steps I took were quite similar to those Amy Hoy writes about. There were a couple of moments of weirdness, but overall, quite simple.

1. Dumped existing Typo database into a text file
2. Since we switched hosts, recreated the typo database on the new host using the text file from step #1
3. Created a new database for our Mephisto installation
4. Installed Mephisto and set up the initial database by running rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production
5. Set up the Mephisto database.yml to reflect both the new database and a typo: entry to reflect the existing Typo database
6. Run the Typo converter - ./script/runner "Mephisto.convert_from :typo" -e production

Just a couple of minor gotchas that I ran into:

• Existing Typo users didn't show up right away. Made them admin through raw SQL - update users set admin=1 - and it worked. Disallowed login for the default "admin" user.
• Couldn't upload a theme. Had to manually copy the theme I wanted (see below) to the themes/site-1/other directory, then applied it using the themes interface.

Big props to Delynn Berry for creating the Mephisto version of the Scribbish theme. Honestly, it was the serious lack of a decent theme for Mephisto that kept me from doing this sooner. So thanks, Delynn.

Just read over at PJ Hyett’s blog that they’ve launched Chow.com, a great site which is (unsurprisingly) about food.

The amazing part is that their small team of Rails developers built the site in two months. And that together, Chow.com and Chowhound (an already popular, massive site for foodies) took just 6 months to develop and launch. A real Rails success story. Congrats guys.

Borrowing from a lot of Rails’ concepts, Rob Conery has come up with something that’s pretty sweet if you’re developing on ASP.NET – The .NET ActionPack. Complete with obligatory screencast. There’s definitely some configuration that needs to take place in order to get started, but once you’re done, it seems like you could really fly (relatively, in a .NET sorta way :).

I’m definitely not suggesting that all us Softies forget about Rails and head back to ASP.NET in droves, but this looks quite promising for those folks that are absolutely tied to ASP.NET for one reason or another. And it’s awesome to see Rails’ influence on members of the .NET development community who realize that it’s time to start writing less code and be more productive.