justaddwater.dk

Earlier I wrote how we use Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool at work. Hobo is a promising plugin for Ruby on Rails to speed up development even more. At work, we’ve been looking into rapid prototyping of web applications for quite some time. Hobo might even help us to speed up development even more.

Hobo is an Open-Source project, designed to make development with Rails even faster than it already is. It features:

• A template engine that extends Rails’ standard ERB templates with user-defined tags
• A powerful library of pre-defined tags for knocking up ajaxified data-driven sites in a snap
  (lots still to do — help us)
• Smart support for ajax – easily re-render fragments of your page without extracting them into partials

And further down in the release announcement:

• Hobo extends Rails is a number of ways, to let you build full blown web applications very quickly and easily.
• Hobo lets you add dynamic Ajax interfaces to your application with no extra programming.

But the best part (I think) is the better support for Ajax user interface development, as is mentioned briefly:

• Hobo can speed up the creation of rich, complex web applications as well as simple internal apps and rapid prototypes.

• Hobo is a great way for newcomers to Ruby on Rails to learn and practice agile, iterative application development.

Please do note that the team mentions that they don’t consider the release (0.4) stable enough yet to go into production code. The team made a screencast with feature highlights available at the Hobo blog.

Other mentions:

• Pune Ruby: Play with Hobo
• MucoSoft: Hobo, Ruby on much more simple Rails
• Red Ferret: Hobo – the ultra fast web app builder for Rails
• Justaddwater.dk: Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool

Technorati Tags: hobo, prototyping, html, ruby on rails, business case, capgemini, productivity, work, rubyonrails, rails

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 22:17 (GMT-1) and is filed under Prototyping, Ruby on Rails, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.