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For those wishing to file a Class Action against eBay/PayPal:

http://www.43things.com/things/view/193389/file-a-class-action-lawsuit-against-ebay-and-paypal

http://www.screw-paypal.com/paypal_lawsuits.html

Bwahahaha

http://www.43things.com/person/jmcvetta/photos/

I manage to pay my bills -- which in Boston are not inconsiderable -- by writing Free Software.

Did that make you a "gloomy, miserable wretch"?
http://www.43things.com/person/jmcvetta

Define "high usage website". RoR-powered sites like 43 Things and ODEO don't seem like backyard hobby projects to me.

here

Recently I have read some
material about team work written by
a Allen Fahden.

He talks about different roles in team work.

He has made a survey where your can find you natural work role.
http://www.oneminutemillionaire.com/tools/hots.asp

Your start to procrastinate when the type of work your do, don't match your natural role.

And since project work includes 4 types of work, your have 3 kinds of work that your can
start procrastinating on.

But if your make a project team, so that at least one person is good at every type of work.

Your can speed up productivity with 300-800 %.

I have written a little about is here.
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/TWiki/Build AProjectTeam

People that find it interesting and would like
to join a team like that, can go to.
http://www.43things.com/things/view/417139

For example any real enterprise application requires end to end transaction support. Does ActiveRecord handle that? What if the transaction is distributed across systems like mainframe 3270 terminals, couple of web services and some database access? I'm sure doing this in RoR would be much harder and probably take more code than doing it in robust enterprise frameworks like J2EE.

This may come as a shock to you, but most websites don't need a mainframe of 3270 terminals to run. I know, I know, it's as much as a surprise to me as it is to you. I even hear that one can create a commercial website for under a million dollars, these days! What will they think of next? Maybe home users will have websites next!

The point I'm not-so-subtly trying to make is that enterprise-grade, million dollar web applications that handle a kazillion hits a day aren't actually that common. It's true that Rails isn't going to create the next Google, but there are websites out there which don't have to handle hundreds of gigabytes of traffic per day. Ruby isn't designed for the enterprise. It's designed to run small to middle-sized web-applications, such as 43 Things or Penny Arcade. And sites like these make up the majority of the net, whilst web applications suited for "enterprise use" are in a considerable minority.

An alpha framework? I'm not sure that an alpha framework is responsible for so many great apps IN OPERATION. Basecamp [www.basecamphq.com] services 10K+ customers, if I recall correctly. Don't be fooled by its 1.0 status. I've seen many 1.0 apps with less behind them than Rails.

To name just a few really busy rails driven sites:

http://www.basecamphq.com/ Tens or thousands of users

http://www.backpackit.com/ Thousands of users

http://www.43things.com/ Big enough for Amazon to care

This is of couse ignoring all the private rails apps used internally by some pretty decent sized companies.

Rails scales amazingly well on lighttpd with fcgi Apache with fcgi does a pretty good job as well.
You can run it on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 and just about any other respected(I use the term loosely with WS2003 on the list) server operating system.

I happily use Slashdot's RSS feed to cut down the time I spend procrastinating on Slashdot.

• http://www.43things.com/ Nice amazon-like community thingy
• http://www.basecamphq.com/ Online project management sofware
• http://www.tadalist.com/ Todo-lists
• http://www.snowdevil.ca/ Snowboard stuff

http://www.43things.com/things/view/215 ..runs on Rails
http://bitmask.co.uk/notes/

Ruby on Rails is growing at an astounding rate right now, which is not at least due to the growing number of real-life applications that has been build upon it. Including:

Basecamp -- The original Rails application from which the framework was extracted. A hosted project management application that combines weblog, todo lists, milestones, file storage, and more to keep everyone on the same page in a project.

43 Things -- The "What do you want to do with your life?" application that lets you enter the 43 things that you're currently looking to achieve in life. You can blog about doing it, find others doing the same, and give advice to people who are doing things you've done.

Ta-da List -- The todo list component of Basecamp factored out into a free mini application. Uses XMLHttpRequest and other JS techniques to keep the interface super snappy. Sharable todo lists for every occasion.

And those are just a small sample of all the public applications out there on Rails. On top of that, there's a wide range of e-commerce, content management, business intelligence, intranet systems, and more being build inside a lot of organizations.

Exciting times!

This is not insightful. If you want to see how well it scales look all all the production grade applications out there. The source to hieraki is freely accessible.

Rails is NOT your run the mill proof of concept framework. Its the next level of programming environment right now and here. Available for you to download under MIT license. The people who use it make applications magnitudes faster than the people who aren't. Single people can be as productive as whole teams.

There hasn't been an improvement in productivity like this in recent programming-history.

And don't just put down what you don't understand, give it a try.

Your attitude will just get you boring jobs.

You might want to tell that to Basecamp, 43 Things, and Tada Lists, since they obviously have no idea that Rails isn't good for anything of that magnitude. Might also mention it to all the thousands of people that use those sites, daily, and to the handful of developers who built and deployed those sites in a fraction of the time and cost of other web solutions.

Then again, maybe you shouldn't...

The other key part of social categorization is that there is a *feedback loop* based on tag popularity that reinforces common tags - the more people who use a tag, the more prominence it gets in the system, encouraging people to use the common term.

Flickr and 43things use bigger type to show tag popularity.

Social categorization is useful because it is fuelled by self-interest - people tag info in these systems to find it later themselves - but it has a public benefit in finding related information.

It's also no silver bullet - but it's useful as part of a bigger information architecture effort (my business partner started the whole discussion about social categorization, and we're starting to use it on some projects)