Lunchtime Semaphore

I don’t know what make me buy this book a few years back: I was not using Ruby, had no planning to go for web development and never heard of Rails before. But flipping through the book in the bookshop made me realized that there had been some big changes in the way the web was working: sure, hacking some html and javascript everything is possible… in theory. In practice, a limit is quickly reached where it becomes prohibitive to make changes. That’s where framework such as Rails comes in the picture.

So here I was, I got the book and start reading it. Even if I’m still not doing Rails or Ruby, or even developing web applications, this book had a significant influence. First, I became quite a fan of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series, and other of these books are probably going to appear in this blog soon. These books are generally very well written and organized.

The other influence was the discovery of the MVC model. At that time, in the OTB-Applications project we were starting to have some trouble with our more advanced applications to add functionalities, fix the bugs, etc. What the MVC model could bring here was a much easier maintenance and indeed, it did. The latest applications developed following this model were much more robust, and we are still following this now.