This goal has been on my 43things list for an entire YEAR, and on my mind for much longer. But, I can finally say I have an app up and running… and I even got paid to do it! I’m where I want to be now – I’ve done freelance web development with Rails and can even list it on my resume.

As a professional web developer locked into Microsoft antiquated technology like old-school Visual Basic and ASP, I can say that Ruby on Rails is a godsend. The major strengths are that it gets you up and running quickly and it makes maintenance easy. In my day job with ASP, those things are a nightmare.

I love rails, but I cannot use it at work. However, there is no doubt in my mind that it’s ideas are going to be integrated into whatever future framework becomes the next enterprise standard. It seems like bunches of frameworks are sprouting up now for JavaEE and .NET and PHP, so I know things are going to get better down the road for this profession.

Yet, I feel like this whole style of development is still immature. Even after the Firefox revolution, the web browser itself is still clunky and needs hacks (ajax) to be somewhat interactive. Don’t get me wrong: for a developer, web forms beat desktop clients like Java Swing any day.

Rails is definitely a HUGE step forward, but what comes next? There is no doubt in my mind that the web will be used as a computing platform for a long time in the future. But I can see it eventually going the way of COBOL and being succeeded by something better.