Mike Clark, author of Pragmatic Project Automation, caught up with me for a few quick questions about the automation of Rails. A snippet:

Mike: Everybody who tries Rails raves about how it makes them super productive. What types of automation does Rails employ to help developers create great apps so quickly?

David: The basic philosophy is to encourage good behavior through invitations. So, for example, when you use the generator to create a new model or controller, it also creates unit test stubs that are all hooked up. You just enter a new test case and off you go. The same goes to fixtures, where a YAML file is already created and hooked up, just waiting for you to input the data…

We also talk about Rake and continuos integration with Damage Control. Additionally, it was great to see Mike so excited about Rails:

Rails projects are popping up all over. I just started converting a small J2EE project to Rails, and let me just say that Rails is highly addictive stuff.