Web Development Tools for 2010

by James

My pick of top tools for web development using Ruby. Some old, some new, all useful.

Rack

If you’re hacking together any kind of web application using Ruby, you should be using Rack.

Rack is to server interfaces what Rails was to frameworks — it simplifies the way frameworks and servers talk to each other, and lays down some very simple rules which help everyone share code, even between different frameworks.

Even if you’re not using Rack directly, it’s great to have an understanding of the software because it underpins Rails. Learn about Rack, and all that config.middleware will start to make more sense!

TextMate

TextMate is venerable by now (version 2 may be released sometime “soon”, which will be cool), but in my opinion it’s still the standard by which other Mac coding apps should be judged. I would not be freelancing today if it wasn’t for TextMate.

The app is Mac only, of course, so if you’re on Windows you know what to do.

Rails 3

I’m very excited about Rails 3. It won’t be perfect, but the promise of real modularity, better routing, performance enhancements, swappable Javascript (hello JQuery) and other good stuff is, well… good!

The tentative release date for a Rails 3 beta is late January, but you can play with nearly working source code right now. For interesting insights into the development of Rails 3, be sure to subscribe to Yehuda Katz’ blog.

Github

Over the past few years, Github has become the default place for Rubyists to share code (Git is close to becoming the unofficial “official” Ruby SCM). Github is also great because it is built using Rails and Ruby, and the Github blog is a great place to go if you want to learn some new tricks.

NoSQL

Maybe this will be the year that no-SQL technologies like Mongo and MongoMapper go mainstream. There’s a dawning realisation that SQL, while useful, is overkill in certain circumstances, and there’s already a lot of support for new, more flexible ways of storing data.

I’m particularly interested in friendly, which lets you use no-SQL principles with an SQL database. Some of my smaller apps are on shared hosting, where a MySQL database is really the only option: friendly to the rescue!

Conclusion

This is a completely personal perspective, of course: some of these tools aren’t new, but they’re the ones I’m most looking forward to using in 2010.

Disagree, or think I’ve missed something? Comments are open :)