So I'm back at work again, but my job has changed. No longer am I the stealthy IT ninja, whose responsibility it is to replace components the day before they they break, anticipate obscure printer errors that could bring ruin to the marketing department, repair desktops while their users are out for a cup of coffee, and arrive silently in an employee's cube before they hang up the phone. I'm still messing about with the network monitoring system (especially the TAP gateway, which fails silently half the time), but my official job is now within the realm of support. Working against time on a laptop with a failing hard drive, I'm writing a support web site with the Ruby on Rails framework which will interface with our customer relations management service.

Let me tell you this: Ruby. Is. Amazing.

I've set aside this week simply to learn the language and the framework, and the sheer amount of magic in Rails is astounding. I'm not entirely sure I like the eRuby template system for views, but the astounding simplicity of ActiveRecord makes the whole thing worth it. The way it manages relationships between tables takes all the work out of SQL management... and some of the methods available for model objects are startlingly useful. Data validation rules make a lot more sense when implemented as a part of a smart model object, rather than being controller-specific.

Then there's the controller logic, which when coupled with RoR's url_for() logic solves the problem I've been facing with Ragnar since the beginning: how to relate the URL to the scripts which interpret them. I've pushed the logic into the XSLT templates and allowed the designer of those to create their logic thus, but that methodology makes it difficult to dynamically generate URLs--they have to be created by the controller and passed to the template as parts of the XML document.

In any case, learning the Rails framework has been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to starting the real work next week.