Rails was always the idealistic young teenager of web frameworks. It was opinionated, dynamic and fast. It was ideal for the type of young oppinionated startups that use it as the basis of their business. Adding features and functionality quick was king.

By now it has become second nature to most of us to create cool user interfaces with Ajax and getting a new project up and running in 2 days flat.

Now many of these young startups that grew up with Rails have obviously been hit by the realities of running large scale successful services.

The annoyances of migrating database changes, of upgrading a running production app or breaking your app just by running “gem update”.

All real annoyances tend to strike a nerve in the creativity of the geeks who experience them. So where rails last year revolutionized the rapid development of advanced web apps and earlier this year revolutionized AJAX development, we now have rails revolutionizing application maintenance and production tasks.

Rails 1.0 as far as I can see, is about making a superb development framework into a solid production environment with all the important tasks and workflows handled.

I am very excited about this release. Of course we are still in Release Candidate mode. Rails has had a history of stable 0.×.1 and problematic 0.×.0 releases. The new Release Candidate approach should also help get over this.

Which new things am I most excited about?

• SwitchTower
• Database-agnostic schemas
• Making scripts, environment.rb and Rakefile easier to upgrade
• Plugins
• Fastcgi handler is more production friendly
• Speed
• Better session administration

Congratulations to the Rails team (and to me for leaving J2EE so I can work fulltime with Rails. It also goes without saying that this is great for all the many small web startups who are using Rails.

Just written a quick intro on my other blog on my new ActiveCrypto for Ruby on Rails. Here’s a little sneak:

class Document < ActiveRecord::Base
	encrypt :title,:body, :key=>:user
	belongs_to :user
end

John over at Daring Fireball has an interesting piece called The Life, where he talks about the economic realities of being a successfull one man ISV in the Mac world.

It is based around the NewsGator’s recent purchase of Ranchero Software, which apparently has caused a bit of frustration amongst Ranchero Software users.

He mentions many of the hard realities of being an ISV. Like support costs:

But selling software isn’t like selling books. When a book takes off and climbs the best-seller charts, that’s just money in the author’s pocket. Each software sale, on the other hand, comes with incremental support costs.

Read the full story. I think it’s still a worthy business to be in, besides the fact that it does include a lot of work. I also have to add that I think that most of the best software in the mac world comes from Solo ISV’s and I hope they keep coming up with all the great innovative software that we all know and love.

So I ended up quitting my nine to five job. In Denmark you have to give 30 days notice to the end of a calendar month, so I actually did it a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t write about until today for various reasons.

It became more and more difficult to do what I wanted to do next to a steady job, so it was time to go.

I will be starting freelancing again around Nov. 1. This suits my temprament more. I think it is more honest and transparent. This was my first perm job in more than 10 years and I wont be doing another one unless it is something I really believe in. You know a job with a mission at a company with a mission.

I do have a few things lined up mostly Java (unfortunately), I also aim to put a lot more time into my own projects. If you need an experienced rails freelancer please let me know and I’ll send you my CV/Resume.

Feel free to email me at [email protected] or skype me at berserkertooth.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words and encouragements.

Due to a recent influx in interest from people I have brought NeuClear.org Wiki and the client NeuClear Signer back from the dead.

NeuClear.org was/is my open source project for creating payment and trading systems. My current ideas is to eventually rewrite it in Ruby on Rails as it would allow some more creative uses of it.

Feel free to add questions within the wiki and if anyone is interested in continuing the work let me know.