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Like it? It’s my new retro-nym, it stands for “Rails Apache MySQL POSIX”.

I know, I know, Rails has generated a lot of buzz, too much in many people’s eyes. It certainly is not the be-all and end-all of web frameworks, but it’s cool.

I spent Saturday reading the PickAxe book and why’s Poignant Guide. Today I felt ready. I braved the Debian install of Ruby, and set about developing my first Rails app.

For the Pythonistas out there, the best way to describe it would be Quixote meets PSP meets SQLObject. I’ve used Quixote and SQLObject (with CheetahTemplate) to build a hotel management system, and it is extremely smooth, but because they are disparate parts, they don’t integrate as well as they could. Re-examining my previous code, I could have cut the development time literally in half.

It’s not that they have bad integration, in fact at the time I thought the integration was great. It’s just that having seen how ActiveRecord is such an integral part of Rails, you start to realise how much further that integration could go. I think this is what Subway is aiming for.

I’m developing a personal project in Rails to learn the ropes, get in the swing, and generally monkey around. After that, barring any overwhelming reason not to, I’ll be developing my company’s new product in it.

So, to the point: I’m here to advocate that any computer polyglots out there realise that sometimes it’s worth learning a new language (or revisiting an old one) to get at its tools. Rails definately applies here, and I think Seaside2 does too.