Tuesday November 08, 2005
If I where nostalgic about Rails and everything surrounding it I would probably say things like:
I remember when:
- …More than 100 users in #rubyonrails was considered “crazy lots”.
- …When I had no idea how nice and speedy Lighttpd really was.
- …When TextDrive was the only host support Rails and FastCGI.
- …When we didn’t have fancy stuff such as a unified ActiveRecord::Base#find method and dynamic finders.
- …When we didn’t have any way to cache things easily.
- …When there was that bug with has_and_belongs_to_many inserting records twice in the join table.
- …When we had to restart our fastcgi servers in development mode to reload changes.
- …When ActionPack didn’t cache the compiled ERb templates
- …When we didn’t have Routes to make up some lovely clean urls as we saw fit.
- …When there was no built-in way to generate HTML tags programmatically.
- …When Basecamp and 43things was the biggest Rails applications.
- …When we had to write all our model validations without the validates_* methods.
- …When we had to write RSS feeds using plain old rhtml instead of dead-easy Builder integration.
- …When I downloaded every single Rails application and pasted every code snippet into ~/Desktop/Rails I came across, just to see how they’ve done things.
- …When using cookies was really slow.
- …When we had to use
foo.add_to_bars(baz) instead of foo.bars << baz.
- …When we didn’t have ActionMailer.
- …When no-one knew what the term ajax was, or had any way of easily using xmlhttprequest and friends.
- …When
ApplicationController was called AbstractApplicationController.
- …When models and helpers didn’t load themselves “automagically”.
- …When almost no-one apart from DHH made a living out of coding Rails all day long.
…And we still had to wade through 12 meters of snow just get to work in our PHP/Java/Perl/whatever shops
Boy, has Rails come a long way since I started playing around with Rails in september 2004. And with the infamous 1.0 just around the corner, the future still looks just as bright.