Calming Anil Dash's concerns of shiny technology.
Anil Dash from Six Apart is worried that Blinksale is getting attention for all the wrong reasons.
That just because it’s using Ruby on Rails, features snappy Ajax, and
is built by a small team it should be inherently deserving of
attention. Christian from xml-blog tries his hand at explaining to Anil why it is indeed exciting, at least in regards to Rails:
What I will say is that I understand why Rails/Ajax
enthusiasts get so excited about every new product built on Rails that
sees the light of day. First, it’s well documented that few IT projects
ever make it to production. Second, once you’ve actually worked with
Rails, you tend to fall in love with it. This is not some sort of
new-kid-on-the-block infatuation; it’s a kind of thankful love born of
the countless hours Rails shaves off your development time letting you
concentrate on the very thing Anil is concerned about: building apps
that meet a need or solve a real-world problem. Lastly, it’s a bit of
cheerful exuberance at seeing that mere mortals are indeed able to
complete a plan-build-deploy cycle for a real-world Rails application
in short time and have it withstand all the traffic that invariably
will be thrown at it.
To add my own two cents, I
think it’s very exciting to see Blinksale go live using the technology
and approach to software development that we’re championing at 37signals.
It shows that others are more than able to use our tools and thoughts
to achieve good things, which again encourages the belief that Rails
and Getting Real are indeed not specific to a single crew — but that you can use them too to similar effect.
Oh,
and Blinksale does work very nicely for sending out invoices, too ;).
37signals already sent our first real invoice through the system. [Riding Rails]