I started messing around with Ruby on Rails for the first time on Sunday. This was after spending all day Saturday tearing down kitchen cupboards, tiled sinks and entire walls for a friend who is remodeling his house, so I got my fill of building last weekend whether real or virtual.

Photo: bruce grant

Trying to figure out how Ruby on Rails worked, I felt like I was remodeling my brain. It was as if I walked into Ikea with just a basic idea of what I wanted my new kitchen to look like and then walked out with design schematics and new appliances an hour later. I suddenly had confidence that I could create a really nice web site with a lot of functionality that was basically inaccessible to me before because of my limited programming background.

The “Ah hah!” moment came for me when I added two words to one of the scripts: “scaffold mydatabase”. When I refreshed my web site, I was adding, editing and deleting data in my database via a web interface. It all automatically just worked. Then literally 15 minutes later I had 2 databases talking to eachother.

It’s mindblowing how much power this environment gives to people who aren’t true coders.

I have a feeling I’ll get stuck and frustrated with what I’m trying to build. But I’m very hopeful Ruby on Rails will get me closer than I could with open source PHP tools. If nothing else, I’ll get a sense for this new trend.

Programming seems to have about a 3 year fashion cycle that also intersects with influxes of new ideas for web applications and a full cycle of students coming out of university. Now we’re at the early stages of a creative explosion on the Internet enabled by things like Rails, open APIs, storage solutions like S3, and JSON. And you can also wrap an idea in any number of different business models in even less time than it takes to build the product itself.

Maybe instead of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), we now have RASH (Rails, APIs, S3, Hosted).

There must be similar reactions to breakthroughs in the construction industry when things like cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) hit the market. Of course, construction suffers from bad naming as much as any other trade. Not everything can be as cool as a sawzall or funny pipe.

The concept of “Loose Coupling” is great on so many levels. I’ve used it to describe different types of things in ideal worlds, but I’m starting to see that there is a lot of gray area there that can be maddening in real worlds.

Here is Wikipedia’s current definition of it:

“Loose coupling describes a resilient relationship between two or more computer systems that are exchanging data. Each end of the transaction make their requirements explicit and make few assumptions about the other end. Loosely Coupled systems are considered useful when either the source or the destination computer systems are subject to frequent changes.”

I’m working with a small team on a really fun web-based product that weaves lots of stuff together. The core app we’re working on has a very powerful layer of intelligence built into it, but it depends on a stack of data sources and rendering environments that are all partially isolated and not necessarily production-ready.

This means that we can’t really test the product end-to-end. It means there are several layers of troubleshooting that get added to each bug no matter how small. It means we have to fake a service layer here and there to emulate behavior.

I’m realizing now that “loosely coupled” means you have to think a lot harder about each move instead of just cranking out everything from scratch the way you want it to work.

Ultimately, the power of our platform services including things like scalability and user data management will accelerate this product’s ability to reach a more profound state of being than it could without loose couplings. But the cost of glueing all the things together in parallel means that we spend hours in meetings and constantly reshuffle our attack plan.

It feels like running through mid-court of a dodgeball game.