James Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark have been working together on a commercial Rails project for a few weeks now. And while Mike has long been singing the praises of Rails (much appreciated!), I’ve been quite curious to hear James’ thoughts. I’m very flattered on behalf of the Rails team to quote the following:

Rails is the most well thought-out web development framework I’ve ever used. And that’s in a decade of doing web applications for a living. I’ve built my own frameworks, helped develop the Servlet API, and have created more than a few web servers from scratch. Nobody has done it like this before.

He goes on to talk about how Rails is of course not perfect, but that he really likes the Convention over Configuration and says “…if I never see another damn XML configuration file in my life, I’d be happy as a pig in mud”.

I can’t wait to see how all these great Java minds are going to unleash their ideas on the platform. There’s a melting pot brewing with the influx of programmers coming from PHP, Java, .NET, and other environments as well as all the designers picking it. Great things in the making.