While I hold down the development cave this week with a broken foot (long story), Michael is representing us at Web 2.0 in San Francisco this week. If you are there, look him up!

InformationWeek did a quick interview with Michael to ask about Ruby on Rails. Besides that blog post, there is a YouTube video of Michael talking about both Ruby on Rails and what we are doing at BuildingWebApps.com as well the bigger story behind Collective Knowledge Works, Inc.

Digg the interview if you like.

Having switched from Windows to Mac a couple months ago, I was interested to see the long series of comments on this post by Peter Cooper on the Ruby Inside blog—Is Windows a First-Class Platform for Ruby. The predominant answer, from many developers with substantial experience, seems to be “no, but it should be.”

My take-aways from this (and from my own experience):

• If you’re a serious Ruby developer today, life is easier if you can avoid Windows
• It’s hard for the Ruby community to keep everything working smoothly on Windows, because most of the senior developers don’t use it
• Like it or not, the majority of the world is on Windows, and for Ruby to achieve the degree of adoption it deserves will require more work on the Windows side

The SD Forum has opened registration for the third annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, to be held April 18-19 in San Jose. While this is a Ruby conference, not specifically a Rails conference, many of the talks are Rails-related.

Christopher and I have been helping out on the program committee, and we’re excited about the list of speakers that the group has assembled. It is likely to be the largest Ruby gathering of the year in the San Francisco/San Jose area.

The speakers range from startups and leading consulting firms to giants Microsoft, IBM, and Sun:

• Tim Bray, Sun: The Rubies in Context
• Alex Le, Friends for Sale
• Parker Thompson, Pivotal Labs: DRYing Up Application Development: Components That Don’t Suck
• Jon Lam, Microsoft: The Borg discovers Ruby and Open Source
• James Lindenbaum, Heroku: Cluster Management with rush, the Remote Ruby Shell
• Tom Mornini, Engine Yard
• Anant Jhingran, IBM
• Jason Hoffman, Joyent
• Joel Dudley, Stanford University: Ruby at the Edge of Biology and Medicine in the Genomic Era
• Ryan Garver, ELC: Ruby features for Open Social Networking
• Blaine Cook, Twitter

The topics span from developments in Ruby interpreters to deploying high-traffic Rails applications. As at any Ruby or Rails conference, many of the speakers are from small companies, but the addition of IBM and Microsoft is worthy of note—clearly Ruby is no longer a fringe language.

We hope to see you there. Conference details and registration.

Michael and I will be speaking at this month’s San Francisco Ruby Meetup on March 25th. We’ll be talking about BuildingWebApps.com, why we are building it, how we are building it, and hopefully, get some feedback from the audience around the question: “What does the the web development community, particularly Ruby and Rails practitioners, need in a resource and teaching site such as our own?”

If you are one of the first couple of people who come to the meeting and mention this post to me (personally), you can get one of our collectible hats.

This is not a post about sound-alike odd science fiction creatures or fuel-efficient vehicles, though I was tempted.

Instead, this is a short aside on two of the proverbial questions of web application development (or more likely, at least for the first, any software development):

1. Should we build “it”
2. Is a browser the best place to implement/operate/or use “it”

Where “it” is variously a feature, tool, or whole application.

On the first, this is usually summed up as “Don’t Re-invent the Wheel” or woven in to the various aspects of DRY and YAGNI. Here, I’m thinking of coining “Don’t Repeat Anyone (else)” too.

The second recognizes the trend of many web apps and technologies that sometimes the usability that you can get in a browser just isn’t all it could be (yet). Things like Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and apps like Google’s Ad-words Editor show the potential benefits to working with hybrids.

As we have continued to build out the back-end of the BuildingWebApps.com platform, we’ve continued to run in to both of these time and time again. Here is a recent example.

BuildingWebApps.com works in part by collecting external knowledge about the Ruby on Rails domain. One aspect of this is that we the human editors of the site read a lot of blogs, articles, and the like, and cherry pick those items that are particularly useful or interesting. From there, we add links to them from our site and categorize these links against our taxonomy.

The workflow has been very much a typical Blog reading exercise, but with very efficient link making thrown in. Think del.icio.us bookmarkleting on steroids. When you need to review hundreds or more things a day, you want the workflow to be fast.

At first, we started building a custom RSS feed harvesting and specialized reader implementation in Rails. After playing with this for a little while, we had one of those do’h! moments: “Let’s not build a full featured reader, we all have our favorites, let’s build something that glues those to our web service instead”. Yes, I know, profound.

With the most excellent assistance of Chris Bailey of Cobalt Edge LLC, we now have a nifty Ruby/Cocoa hybrid app that Chris discusses in his Code Intensity Blog. This new little app lets us use our favorite readers (I’m still a NetNewsWire fan) or even a browser, and harvest links with a minimum of fuss. I’m hopefully that someday if there is interest that this would be a good start to a public means of contributing links too.

His write-up gives some useful tidbits about using Ruby in the Mac OS X Cocoa world, creating a really sweet hybrid app in no time that, repeat after me, Doesn’t Repeat Anyone.