Last week, RailsRumble ’08 was held, with programmers invited to team up and launch an application within a weekend. As the name suggests, it’s targeted to Ruby On Rails programmers, the framework known for its rapid development. The organizers had an array of servers provided to the teams, which could be used to deploy and host the applications.
You can see the list of applications on the event’s page, and what suprised me is that this year, many teams did manage to actually have a running website at the end of the end. A few of them (looking at the entries from intridea for instance) even looked like your standard web2.0 startup. For me, this does prove that technologies like Ruby On Rails has reached their maturity point (also read: mainstream)
In Montreal, a team named GiraffeSoft, with James Golick, Daniel Haran, webmat, and François Beausoeil created the application What Does This Error Mean, which allows Ruby On Rails programmers to get insight from other programmers about application errors. I see it as mix between GetExceptional, FiveRun’s TuneUp, and Marc-André’s refactormycode
The second team from Montreal, named the Webeppis, with Benjamin Jørgensen and Gordon B. Isnor, did Comical, a website for comic artists and their fans.
Both applications obviously need a little bit of finishing touches, but it’s still impressive to know that all work were done in just one weekend. Incidentally, a service provider named HashedRocket took the concept to reality last year, promising their clients to build a web application in under 3 days. Working under these conditions require a very solid methodology (XP and agile development); and good if not great developers.
