Anil Dash from Six Apart is worried that Blinksale is getting attention for all the wrong reasons. That just because it’s using Ruby on Rails, features snappy Ajax, and is built by a small team it should be inherently deserving of attention. Christian from xml-blog tries his hand at explaining to Anil why it is indeed exciting, at least in regards to Rails:

What I will say is that I understand why Rails/Ajax enthusiasts get so excited about every new product built on Rails that sees the light of day. First, it’s well documented that few IT projects ever make it to production. Second, once you’ve actually worked with Rails, you tend to fall in love with it. This is not some sort of new-kid-on-the-block infatuation; it’s a kind of thankful love born of the countless hours Rails shaves off your development time letting you concentrate on the very thing Anil is concerned about: building apps that meet a need or solve a real-world problem. Lastly, it’s a bit of cheerful exuberance at seeing that mere mortals are indeed able to complete a plan-build-deploy cycle for a real-world Rails application in short time and have it withstand all the traffic that invariably will be thrown at it.

To add my own two cents, I think it’s very exciting to see Blinksale go live using the technology and approach to software development that we’re championing at 37signals. It shows that others are more than able to use our tools and thoughts to achieve good things, which again encourages the belief that Rails and Getting Real are indeed not specific to a single crew — but that you can use them too to similar effect.

Oh, and Blinksale does work very nicely for sending out invoices, too ;). 37signals already sent our first real invoice through the system.