Ruby on Rails
Our overview of some of the new ideas that are shaping Web 2.0 began on Monday with a look at a user-organized news site, Digg (Wow! Look at its traffic since we mentioned it), and continued Wednesday with a hot mobile content platform, GooLabs. Today, it's the turn of a programming language that's making the next generation of websites possible — the colourfully named Ruby on Rails.
If you talk to developers working on big web projects today, you'd better be prepared to deal with some heavy terminology. They might hit you with Ajax and tags, RDF feeds and FOAF, Sparklines and Microformats, CSS and, of course, Ruby on Rails. It's like the jargon of an odd science fiction story.
Still, all those terms and all those technologies are being used today on an exciting project at the BBC. The corporation's archive is a huge database that's been lovingly built over decades and soon it will be a website that all of us can access. We're talking about a million programmes with descriptions, contributor details, broadcast history and annotations. The public beta will be online early next year. This is a screenshot of what you will get when searching for the late, great DJ, John Peel.
Along with Murray Walker and Ben Hammersley, one of the key people working on this "Database to End All Databases" is Matt Biddulph and he'll be talking about the project and about Ruby on Rails at the London Frameworks Night on Thursday, 17 November. Be there.
