David Geary did a cool demonstration of Rails yesterday at the Denver Java User Group by getting a member of the audience, unfamiliar with Rails, to do the demo for them:

In the end, Kirk pulled off the demo without a hitch. That says something about Kirk, but it speaks volumes about Rails. After he left the podium, I added some users to the db and refreshed the app and there, magically, were the new rows in the database. Then I tweaked the pagination parameter for the controller that controls page size from 10 to 5, saved the file and refreshed the browser. I asked the audience if they noticed how long that deployment took. Then I changed the prameter to 3 and then to 2 and reran the demo each time. Each time, the number of contacts displayed updated according to the pagination parameter and each time the redeploy time was, well zero. That got people’s attention.

Change’n’refresh is an intensely addictive form of working, no doubt.