At OkapiStudio we always stay in touch with the latest trends out there related to web, print, motion and many other aspects of our daily business activity. Not long after the Web 2.0 boom, people are already starting to talk about Web 3.0 and its semantic aspect, about software acting like a service and other things related to this unprecedented fast and efficient evolution of the technology.

The Rails framework for Ruby, created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner with 37Signals (I am sure Sam will dedicate a few posts to H. H. himself), aims to increase the speed and ease of web development. You will find Rails associated with many true Web 2.0 applications.

We did research on both Ruby and Rails for a few days. Working on a Mac OS X environment, we found the installation to be a true quest and fastidious process. While on PC you have a fast installer, on Mac there is an entire process that involves spending a few hours in front of a black command prompter terminal. And if you start installing it don’t do it at 3 AM, please be fresh, do it in the morning, without too many things on your mind. I messed up the installation process 3 times on my machine before getting it right. There is a great aspect to this though, Apple will start shipping Rails with it’s next version of OS X, Leopard.

After browsing two Rails books we started the tutorials. I personally didn’t write any line of code and felt that after the experience with the installation process an even harder process will begin. I was thinking that perhaps we’re just wasting time and we should focus our energy on other aspects of our business. And i couldn’t have been any wronger.

Not even one hour later, Gabi, with a big and amazed smile on his face was having a first fully functional Rails application working. Nothing fancy, just some basic input of information into a database, with editing and sorting and a couple of other features. It was “magic”, this is the word the Rails guys are using, mostly because you use few lines of code and commands to trigger so many processes in the background that generate fast results.

And i will explain this magic by an example so you would understand even though you never wrote a single line of code in your life.

A few days later, working on a timesheet application we initially planned to have developed in PHP, our fellow programmer Corneliu was stating “it would have taken me 3 days to do the code for the same functionality you did in Rails in just 3 hours”. We’ll post the first screenshots of an incipient Alpha release in a few days.

We appreciate Rails because it truly stands up to it’s promise to ease and speed up the web development process.