While most of my expertise has been in developing desktop applications, I was recently moved to our web team. I have written a web application before, an ISAPI dll at that, and as expected, web development has only improved marginally since my last forray.

At work we use C# and VB.NET with ASP.NET. While I love the C# syntax and Visual Studio is impressive, web development is still tedious. Even simple sites can takes days or weeks to implement. While some of this is due to ignorance, some is from lack of innovation in the web development realm.

I had heard of and tinkered with PHP, Perl, Python and the essentially defunct ASP and none impressed me for web development. They are behind ASP.NET technologically and usually combine business logic right into the web page, since language limitations made it the easiest route. Yuk!

Another option, Java Server Pages, are far too complex.

A few friends at work keep me up to date on various programming languages and language features they encounter. Such friends are always great to hang around since they have a passion for innovation, whether the innovation is from them or someone else. Sure enough one introduced me to Ruby on Rails, a framework for developing web sites based on the Ruby programming language.

I had heard of Ruby previously, but I didn’t really have much desire to check out another scripting language, that is until Rails came along.

I don’t know all the details, but Ruby supposedly offers features that make the creation of Rails possible. While similar frameworks exist for PHP, Python, Java and C#, they are all hamstrung, although some only to a small degree, by language limitations.

With all the press Rails is getting, I had no choice but to take a closer look. Next, I needed a project. Viola Nutrition Facts.

Nutrition Facts is an application I wrote for windows that allows quick searching of a food database to determine carb or fat counts, etc. This would be a perfect project to move to the web.

So I am off and running developing my first web app with Rails. While I am still in the early stages, I have noticed something. Rails makes programming fun. It eases the tedious programming tasks associated with the web. WOW! Web development can be fun!

As I progress through my project, I will create new articles to detail the problems and successes I encounter.

Happy Web Programming