I was asked to give an introductory workshop in Ruby on Rails for an insurance company. An intranet application was build in Ruby on Rails for this company and now they want to have the knowledge to maintain the application themselves. So I organized a workshop in two sessions to touch on the basics of Ruby and Rails. And I have to say, it is not easy …. especially when this application has polymorphic and has_many :through associations… :-)

I myself started with Ruby on Rails in October 2005 (I had no experience with Ruby at all) and I remember it was straight forward, although it toke me a while to understand (for example) some of the magic of ActiveRecord (made possible by Ruby). But now 2,5 years later we have Rails 2.1 (since yesterday!) and it has a lot of new concepts and extra features and therefore I think it is a lot harder to get started. My preparation for this workshop made me realise that now it will take more time to really get acquainted with the full potential of Rails.

And to be honest, working every day with Rails, it still is a challenge to keep up-to-date with the new features in Rails (which seems to be added almost ‘every’ day) and all the new developments and innovation in the Ruby and Rails community. The day before yesterday I had never heard of Maglev or Mongrel-esi…..