Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium?

In response to Jonathon re: installation. The first time I downloaded and set up a dev Rails setup, I was up and running in under 10 minutes. That probably includes download time as well!

In fact the one thing about Rails that gets you interested it is it's instant satisfaction. Along with it's easy install, the 'scaffolding' concept that uses database introspection to auto-build template pages means that you can have a little test site running much faster than even PHP.

A bit later, the "everything's an object" philosohpy of Ruby gets you hooked enough that the dumb (in my opinion) single db table hierarchy setup doesn't seem so bad.

The Rails community is also looking seriously at that inheritance issue, and there certainly seem to be developers of good calibre involved.

And while less people know Ruby than TCL, Ruby does not have the limitations of TCL and is a language that computer scientists can get excited about.

Note that Rails is not a competitor to OpenACS if you want to use some OACS packages. But once the Rails community settles on a common authentication system, it will become a very serious competitior for people who use OpenACS mostly for the framework/toolkit.