This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Original Post: Why are designers excited about Rails?
Feed Title: Loud Thinking
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking
Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp
Rails is the middle ground for a lot of incredibly interesting interactions between designers and programmers. As Rails was extracted from Basecamp where the collaboration between designers and programmer(s) has been intensely tight, it's very welcome to see that this pattern replicates outside the original setting too.
One of the reasons for this is of course that designers are able to work right on the system without loosing their mind. The cries of Ruby in the template is always a call coming from over-caring programmers that think they need to shield the poor programmers from the evils of code. But I and others have found through experience that there's no reason to sell designers short like this.
The primary reasons for this is of course the rise of the domain language and the succinct nature of Ruby. Designers are perfectly capable of understanding and manipulating constructs like <% for person in @post.whos_talking %> or < if @person.administrator? %>. While they will rarely be the originator for these fragments, they'll surely be the manipulators of them. Moving stuff in and out of conditions and loops.
A recent example of this is a posting by Justin Palmer on creating the Azure template for Typo (that hot weblogging engine in Rails):
As I’m still new to ruby and rails , I thought it might be somewhat of a learning process trying to get this implemented, boy was I wrong.
It was extremely easy to get everything put in place. While there is mixed ruby and html in the templates, it is very minimal. Great care has been taken to minimize the efforts on designers, and make it just as fun to design for rails as it is to program for it :-) . There’s nothing like the satisfaction of seeing things just come together, and your design coming to life.
At 37signals, the designers (Jason, Ryan) have their own sandbox and uses the same Subversion repository as developers (Jamis, me). Thus, they can make changes to their local version of the application, switch to the browser and refresh. There's no compilation phase. The templates are not overburdened by programming constructs thanks to a strong domain language.
Working on the same code base and sharing the same tools is an empowering environment that unifies the team and breaks down barriers between professions. It's in that mold where magic happens.
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