Matt Zukowski

Coming from Python, I was at first mildly annoyed by how "loose" Ruby felt. The liberties one is allowed to take with the syntax can seem alarming, especially to someone used to Python's nazi-like enforcement of strict conventions.

Eventually though it all falls into place, revealing a beautiful language where concepts and processes easily lend themselves to natural representation. It just *feels* right. What's more, once mastered, the language's messiness encourages the kind of creative problem solving that other languages can only dream about. In Ruby, doing something in a clever way actually feels intrinsically rewarding -- you *want* to make your code concise and clean, and it feels good to do it (unlike in other languages that attempt to strong-arm you into writing good code but only end up getting in the way).

My only gripe would have to do with the occasional awkwardness one encounters when trying to implement dynamically-generated extensions to objects'/modules' behaviour (for example, dynamically generating some methods when a particular module is included).

I strongly disagree with bombguy's review. I found Gallery 2 to be extremely easy to install and configure. The web-based initial configuration worked great, and I was up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Camping is not just Rails-without-all-the-extra-features. It's a worthy framework in it's own right, best suited for applications where Rails doesn't quite cut it. Unlike Rails, Camping is not specifically tied to CRUD-centered applications. This makes it the perfect platform for all those HTTP-based apps, where Rails doesn't quite make sense. This is why we chose it over Rails for the rubycas-server project and we couldn't be happier with the outcome.

At our organization, we use Mongrel running behind Apache as our production server for Ruby on Rails apps. It's fast, simple, and works great.

Our organization needed a wiki system for internal I.T. documentation (runbooks, code snippets, etc.) We tried a number of other wiki systems before settling on Dokuwiki -- Confluence, MediaWiki, VQWiki... the list goes on.

Even though I try to avoid PHP apps as much as possible -- as their average quality tends to be questionable -- Dokuwiki turned out to be a perfect fit for us. It has exactly the range of features we needed (LDAP authentication, syntax highlighting, etc.), it was super easy to set up, looks good right out of the box, and is just an all-around well engineered system.

I'd highly recommend this, especially when you want a solid all-around wiki solution that fits well in the context of a larger organization's I.T. department.