Andy Jeffries, a senior PHP web developer, wrote up an interesting article on Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment.

Although he is Zend Certified Engineer for PHP4 and PHP5, he decided to try the hype and immediately loved it. He lists several features that makes RoR, (quoting) irresistible.

From the list, the ones I like the most are:

• Console for Quick Testing
• DB Migrations
• RESTful Resources

Oh and he has an interesting quote about Django

Out of all the new frameworks, I decided to look at Rails because it seemed to have most of the hype (don’t get me wrong, frameworks such as Django have excellent potential, but I went with the one most people were talking about).

Maybe Google’s AppEngine will help you :-)

Sorry… couldn’t resist…

(photo taken from Global Notícias)

Continuing the stats gathering, I now suggest another metric: the Virtual Richard Stallman that “analyzes the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian-based system, and reports all of the packages from the non-free tree which are currently installed.”

Laptop (Ubuntu Hardy)

$ vrms 

fglrx-control             Control panel for the ATI graphics accelerators
human-icon-theme          Human Icon theme
linux-generic             Complete Generic Linux kernel
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules helper script
linux-restricted-modules- Restricted Linux modules for generic kernels
skype                     Skype - Take a deep breath
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jdk             Sun Java(TM) Development Kit (JDK) 6
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
vodafone-mobile-connect-c Vodafone 3G devices Internet connection assistant
xorg-driver-fglrx         Video driver for ATI graphics accelerators

  18 non-free packages, 1.1% of 1586 installed packages.

It’s an Ubuntu machine

Desktop (Debian Unstable)

$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on nox.local! rms would be proud.

I am proud too :-)

My desktop.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
127 cd
115 ls
30 dig
23 wine
23 vim
23 rm
16 sudo
16 mv
14 mplayer
11 python2.5

(so wine, pr0n and python…great!)

My personal server

# history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
58 vim
34 ls
34 mutt
31 dig
20 ps
20 apt-get
18 dpkg
17 tail
17 route
16 su

(Debian! Debian! Debian)

My laptop

Well.. laptop is sleeping :-)

It seems that a new war started out there. Google launched the Google AppEngine platform, supporting Python and Django out of the box.

On they Google project page, people started to “vote” for the next language to be implemented. It seems that the more “stars” a language has, the more attention it will get from Google.

So pick your favorite programming language, and “star” it on the issue list!

(oh and if you don’t have a favorite language, pick Ruby :-))