Long anticipated by some, a fresh Ruby take on Trac has been released to the public tonight. Lighthouse is the first commercial, closed-source app from ActiveReload, the young company formed by Justin Palmer, who collaborates on Prototype, and Rick Olson, who has met admiration in the Rails community for his open source blog and forum, Mephisto and Beast, his work on the Rails core itself and his authorship of several plugins that are nearly relevant enough to be included into the core. The Rails team has been conscientiously keeping many non-essential-but-damn-useful functions out of their 6.7 megabyte world-beater, and they have a plugin system they can be proud of. Rick and Justin are trying to emulate this in Lighthouse, using beacons for even some of the most preliminary features, like email processing, test reports, and subversion hooks, and promising to soon expose their restful api to whatever beacons the community can cook up. If my hunch is right about this product, this is a new day for software that uses the web to alleviate frustration, a new Ruby component at the bottom of the Rails stack, if you will. Or is it the top? Which end do you put code in? Bottom. But it's at the top of a really high Rails stack over at EngineYard. Now that's metaprogramming!

No offense to Collaboa - I expect that the open source product will eventually surpass its competition as the Ruby community continues to grow. But for now, get your free account, host your open source repo, and let's go where open source is taking us - together! [Disclaimer - although both companies advocated are closed-source, ActiveReload is taking a stand by making much of their product (beacons) de facto open source, as Rails plugins are; and both services are free as in beer - no thirty day cutoff on the basic account.]

Rails runs great on the mac, and it will help a lot to have it pre-installed in leopard. But working on a mac is an experience filled with practical command-line and text tools that are frequently enhanced, however slightly, by graphical interfaces. Rails involves little enough repitition that this may be overkill, but it does kind of seem like a system that could benefit from a graphical interface. Even a web interface!

So I am very curious whether apple will have the initiative to wrap rails into a new generation of their web objects platform (which I think is java based and therefore might profitably use jruby for some things??). If they took technology from iweb and rewrote web objects to spit out rails, and allowed deployment to hosting other than .mac, they'd shatter microsoft with the wave of thundrous web content that they'd spawn. They should license textmate for every new mac, put a smattering of a front end on subversion (which textmate has I suppose), and make the adc site more read/write and social.

Apple has some pretty cool things planned for Leopard on the user side, like the ability to see and operate your buddy's desktop through ichat, and their revolutionary backup system. The leopard server is dramatically improved, with a wiki server, a calendar server, podcast server, network search with spotlight, and generally polished power.

These changes will save a lot of time for a lot of people, and will catalyze all manner of creative and productive moves, I don't mean to denigrate them. But from where I am, the most exciting parts of this release look to be the developer tools. Apple has revised the language it provides for desktop development, Cocoa, and bundled support for all sorts of development involving Ruby, Python, and Rails on top of existing support for Java. They have also made significant revision on their existing tools, and released several new branches onto that tree. There's a new way to animate, new ways to make widgets, great tools for visualizing and analyzing your running app, and simply new ways to communicate.

This system is scheduled to appear pretty soon - and hopefully a couple surprises will be concealed until then. But I think this release will be the fastest adopted ever, will reign over a huge number of switches, and will be the one that helps lots of power users justify the jump to the server edition, and proceed to truly take over the world's mindshare.

Now is the best time in history to get into computer programming. The tools and resources that are floating about these days are remarkable. The field is changing in significant ways this year. Perhaps in a couple years time, when these transformations are more finalized and numerous books have been written (about objectice c 2, ruby 2, flex 2, apollo & slingbox, js 2 and perhaps css 2, and eventually rails 2) the pickings-up will be even tastier.

In this world, the power is to those who can wield the web willfully. Programming has never been more important with respect to each individual's prestige and reach. And although it's not always easy to learn this skill from reading web sites, there are a greater selection of these from the past year - because so many have experienced a renewed love of programming through these new technologies.

I have read and learned a lot from blogs, but I also recommend the pragmatic programmer books. If you're new to programming, just download rails and create some resources, you'll have an experiment up and running in minutes. From that platform, you can tie into many of the latest ideas in one line of code: with plugins. This is a great place to learn because you can usually see the results and create useful things. A lot of it is well documented on sites and blogs.

I'll do what I can to make the learning curve for programmers more gentle in the next couple years. Once we drag you into it, a lot of you will be stunned by how gentle it really is, if you choose the right languages. Cocoa, Ruby, Rails.