A Rails Story, Or An Engine That Really Could

Noel Rappin, Wednesday, September 3, 2008 @ 10:36 pm

Over at the official Ruby on Rails blog, DHH is asking people to share their Rails stories.

Okay, here's mine.

I can actually date this with some precision because I have an email that I sent to my tech-book agent Feb 11, 2005. She was asking me if I had any ideas for books to pitch. I did have one thing...

If you are looking for a cool-sounding newish tool that needs docs badly try this http://www.rubyonrails.com/.

It's a very cool-looking tool for building dynamic web apps in the Ruby programming language...I'd guess the the Pragmatc Programmer folk would be interested if they aren't already doing something with it...

(Of course, PragProg was already working on it, their book came out that August.)

Obviously, I didn't wind up writing a book at that point, because the wxPython book was still in active development, I didn't even do a pitch. I did start to use Rails to build tools to support my agile team, and that quickly became the best part of my job. That part, I think is pretty common to a lot of Rails programmers.

The story I want to tell is about one reason that I was still looking around at web frameworks, which was not, at that moment, my primary job.

A couple of years before, Spring 2003, I was writing web apps in Java and I was also pitching a book on the theme that all the existing Java web frameworks (at that point, mostly Struts), were all super overkill for most small web projects, and the casual, and even not so casual developer was better off building their own framework core -- I still think this was basically true until Rails and that generation of web tools were developed. The book walked the user through a simple set of Java tools for structuring a dynamic web site.

Anyway, I actually had a publisher interested in working on this, only they had a few... modifications they wanted to make. (All I'll say about the publisher is that it was a real tech publishing outfit with a decent reputation...).

The main modification was that they wanted to title the book "The Little Web Engine That Could", and use the illustrations from the book as cover and design elements.

I was, you might say, torn. On the one hand they wanted to publish my book. On the other hand, they were a little over-wedded to their concept. I was afraid that the concept would come off as silly, rather than clever. (Honestly, I was afraid that I'd always be the guy who wrote the dumb train book.) Still, I moved forward with the next step, which was having some potential readers evaluate the outline. And the process ended there, since the potential readers thought the Little Web Engine thing was kind of dumb.

Even after wandering away from web programming for a while, I kept looking out for developments in web frameworks. When Rails came out, I quickly realized that it was exactly what I had been hoping for -- a framework that doesn't get in the way, but let you focus on the fun parts.

That's my story -- from The Little Web Engine That Could to riding the Rails.

Related posts:

1. Has Many has_many: A Refactoring Story
2. Grails and Google App Engine: Birthing Pains
3. Announcing Rails Prescriptions
4. Wanted: A Javascript Source Code Search Engine
5. More Kudos for Rails Prescriptions

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1. 

   That’s brilliant. I think you made the right decision. Along with such seminal tomes as the Pickaxe there also could have been the infamous Engine That Could. To be square I think the theme could have damaged Rails’ reputation in a formulative period of its life .. there’s nothing like a naff-themed book to cut a phenomenon off at its knee-caps. I think now would be the time to dust off the text though, except make it into a kind of history, or retrospective of sorts.

   Comment by luke, Thursday, September 4, 2008 @ 4:05 am

2. 

   I wrote a blog post Java vs. Ruby on Rails that I thought you might enjoy.

   Comment by Robert Miller, Friday, September 5, 2008 @ 5:21 pm

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