Whats Ruby on Rail all about ?
Are you fed up working with your existing technology ?
Are you looking for doing something cool with technology ?
Are you looking for getting higher rate contracts ?
Are you looking to eventually work for some dynamic internet company ?
You need to get started with Ruby on Rail.
If you are already web programer, let say you work with .net or Java or PHP, you will be amazed to use Ruby on Rail.
I personally got surprised when I was able to bring up small cool website in 10-15 minutes, which could have taken me hours in ASP.Net or java. And in addition RUBY on rail is all Ajax.
Ruby:
is an object-oriented programming language with clean syntax, developed in Japan.
Ruby On Rails
also known as RoR or Rails is a Web application framework written in Ruby. RoR is an open-source project that was designed by Web development company 37signals LLC.(people behind www.tadalist.com). It works on Linux, Windows and Macintosh environments, and development can be done at amazing speed and its easy to maintain web sites.
ROR has easy way of developing database driven applications. Core idea is to have less code for application development by avoiding redundancy and following Rails conventions. This means increased performance and, ideally, decreased development times.
You can create Web-based search engine for Flickr in five minutes & complete weblog in 15 minutes. And you get all this with strong support of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) without single line of hand writen javascript.Goal of ROR is not to create a complex development framework that the engineers at Google or Amazon.com will flock to. Instead, ROR is focused on creating templates and designs that tackle the unglamorous problems, such as making database modifications, that the great majority of Web developers face every day.
David Geary, who has authored books on Java and sits on the technical committee for the latest Java Web programming model has said that ROR is 10 times faster than java.
There are some drastic differences with ROR though. ROR doesnt support some of the databse features like "Stored procedure". But it has strong reason for it and internal support.
So why not spend few hours in next few days and get first hand experience on Rails. Presently there is heavy demand for this skill in industry all over USA. If you are looking for change in your skillset and get better opportunities, you need to get into ROR.
To get started here are some of the Tutorials
onLamp
slash7
ror-wiki