Dave Thomas is turning them into believers by the dozen at the No Fluff Just Stuff symposiums. His one-two of Ruby for Java Programmers and Ruby on Rails talks are delivering just the cocktail to get a whole lot of people interested.

One of those people is Rick Ross, the founder of Javalobby. Under the heading of Ruby on Rails is a powerhouse, Rick wrote the following in the most recent newsletter from Javalobby:

I didn’t get to spend much time at the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium here in Research Triangle Park this past weekend, but one noteworthy session I did get to attend was Dave Thomas’ presentation about “Ruby on Rails.” I was amazed as I sat through the 90-minute presentation watching Dave knock out feature after feature of a real-life web application in record time and with more compact code than any I had previously seen.

The Rails developers seem to have carefully considered the recurring pattern needs of web apps, and the framework provides full functionality for a typical database-backed CRUD (create, read, update, delete) application in a matter of minutes. Rails uses intelligent reflection to map database tables to Ruby objects, and the apps you generate with the Rails scripts form a very reasonable foundation for extending and customizing to meet your specific needs. Unit testing is built-in by default, as is a full web server for testing and debugging.

The next time you need to get the job done very quickly you may want to try out Ruby on Rails for yourself. I don’t know enough yet to say how much it can scale, but Rails is quite clearly a major step forward for those who want web application development to be easier. Dave has a new book in beta, check it out here.

Thanks a bunch, Rick. And keep it up, Dave.