Initiation into Ruby

Today, I came across this article on OnJava - Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance by Bruce A. Tate. Bruce Tate has an amazing track record when it comes to identifying successful technologies. He was one of the early developers who

• identified the emergence of the Spring framework;
• predicted the demise of EJB 2 technologies a full year before the EJB 3 expert group abandoned the older approaches.

In his new book Beyond Java, Bruce looks at languages and technologies that may challenge Java's dominance in some development niches. In the above mentioned article, Bruce covers four important emerging technologies -

• Dynamic Languages - Ruby, is the hottest emerging dynamic language. Also, the exploding Ruby on Rails framework takes good advantage of the capabilities in Ruby to build one of the most productive application development frameworks in existence. The list of Java developers adopting Ruby is astounding.
• Continuation Servers
• Convention Over Configuration
• Metaprogramming

Over the past 25 years, I have moved on from programming languages like Assembly, Fortran, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, C# to Java. Bruce mentions that "Java has been an outstanding development language for the industry because it's brought a remarkable unity and attention to important standards where practically none existed before. But like all programming languages, Java will too fade in time." This triggered off a process in me that said, I better take a look at Ruby and Ruby On Rails.

This blog records my progress of learning Ruby and later Ruby On Rails.

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