Check out Rails 2.0 - even if you don't want to use it!
In case you don't know, Rails 2.0 is now out. I'm actually not a huge Rails fan. It's opinionated software and I'm an opinionated programmer - things just wouldn't work out between us!
That said, skimming through the feature lists I've already found some things I did ages ago, some that I was planning to do now, and some that I'll be adding to my task list as I think they are great ideas.
"We’ve also made it much easier to structure your JavaScript and stylesheet files in logical units without getting clobbered by the HTTP overhead of requesting a bazillion files. Using javascript_include_tag(:all, :cache => true) will turn public/javascripts/.js into a single public/javascripts/all.js file in production, while still keeping the files separate in development, so you can work iteratively without clearing the cache."
For those using libraries like JQuery who want to be able to stack the plugins used for particular requests, this could be a very cool feature.
Like you, my opinions don't always match those of Ruby on Rails but I do like a lot of their ideas.
I would love to hear about which of their ideas you like and why. Want to give us your thoughts?
@Steve, I like the attempt to write concise, DRY code. I like minimalist syntax and I like the amazing brain trust that the Ruby world has which has created everything from rake and capistrano to rspec and haml. I love that everything is an object (rather than having primitives like in Java), and I love the easy extensibility/metaprogramming capabilities. I also love closures for handling collections. In short, I love a lot of the language features from Ruby and a lot of the people who chose to use Ruby as a language.
As for Rails itself, I think it overuses helpers, I hate using the database as the definitive source of metadata (as opposed to a programmatically defined object model you just map to a db structure). I dislike limitations on tables, difficulties working with legacy data sources, a slightly too puritanical approach to REST (I love REST, but the Rails implementation to me seems flawed), and as I go through a Rails project I see lots of places where I want to say "I get what you're doing, but THIS would have been - to me - a more elegant approach".
No doubt I'll build a real project in Rails and I'll find that some of the stuff I hate is OK and other things are intolerable, but I certainly have huge respect for the community and the problems they're trying to solve - even if I dn't agree with lots of the detailed design decisions.