That is an excellent question!

Six months later, my good friend (and awesome developer), Simon, said that he was quite impressed with it. So I decided to have another look, this time with my eyes open.

I have been writing an Agile project planner, which is quite amusing! I have been, and still am, against the use of such tools (for another blog). Anyway, it is a good candidate for a web application and there is enough depth to give rails a decent trial.

So far I am quite impressed. The shear pace at which you can knock out functionality is astonishing. For the first time I think I am actually enjoying writing a web application. The amount of code that I have written is negligible, mostly view code and a few bits added to controllers etc. Largely it has been a straight forward and enjoyable exercise.

The next step is to exploit the built-in ajax and drag and drop effects to create a cool way of moving cards into an iteration and progressing them across a Story Board.

Once that is done, all that is left is to train my daughters up and start a web dev company. I'll get my daughters to pump out rails apps after school ;-)

Still lots to learn and I haven't had to deal with deployment, configuration, and other things that always give you headaches on most projects. Still not convinced on the Database-Driven approach either, feels a little odd. Also as it is easy to knock up apps quickly, it is also very easy to create a complete mess faster than ever before! However, thus far, given the choice between writing a web app in Rails, Java/.Net etc, I think i could do the development piece in rails much faster and have loads more fun doing it.