Jim Weirich is a member of the Extreme Programming Cincinnati user group that up until their last meeting was largely a Java gathering. Then something happened as Jim started to show the rest of the group what Rails could do. Mark Windholtz summarized it on their mailing list:

We watched a 10 min Rails video… It blew us away how easy it was to build a minimal web app in 10 minutes. After the video Bill announced that he had a Rails server installed and running. Gerard commented that it took us 2-3 meetings to get Tomcat configured for peoples PCs, while it took Bill about 20 minutes to get a page showing in an unfamiliar technology.

And we realized that XP is not just java (for goodness sake!). We can pair, iterate, and test with Rails just fine. In fact it is probably more XP in that we may be able to talk more about OO design issues that if we were stuck in java land. So it turned out unanimous that we would load-up on Rails and next month start developing something.

I think this is going to be huge amounts of fun.

Welcome to the fun, Mark and the rest of the XP-cincinnati group! You guys should come hang out in #rubyonrails at your next meeting and report on the progress. We’d love to hear how it’s going.

UPDATE: Jim just wrote me with the correction that he wasn’t even at that meeting. The group has upon their own volition found their way to the video and gotten interested off that. That’s even more impressive!