I finally got my core libraries up on GitHub

I hereby confess that I underestimated Radiant CMS. I was looking at the website some years ago, and without digging in too far, concluded that it was a small project to create a CMS in Ruby on Rails, and hadn't really got a lot of traction. I'd be better off with one of the big name CMS's, probably one written in PHP I thought. Well now I'm freelancing and trying to consolidate my favoured technologies to increase re-use, reduce learning time and increase productivity. Choosing a CMS however hasn't been easy, there are so many out there its bewildering, and so many people seem disgruntled with them.

I know enough languages to pick up PHP if I have to, and I already know enough to modify existing code, but like most languages, or even more than most, it hurts my eyes after a few years with Ruby. Now from playing with Magento, I've decided the Zend Framework is where I'll focus when I have to do PHP, so I looked for a Zend based CMS, and the only serious contender seems to be http://www.digitalus.nl. It may well be good, but its in its early stages.

So the other night I stayed up trying to answer the question "Can I seriously use a Ruby-based CMS ie Radiant as my CMS of choice ?", and I came to the conclusion that yes, Radiant is something worth making that kind of investment in. The kicker was the slides from this presentation Pragmatic Content Management with Radiant from Sean Cribbs. It succinctly explains the pages, parts, snippets and layouts. In particular, the idea that a page should have more than one location to be filled by dynamic content is something I implemented in a Flex templating system I wrote. It seem so obvious, yet many systems apparently don't allow it.

Also the extension system, in typical Ruby style seems extremely powerful and useable even on jobs with a tight deadline. And of course, you have the full power of Ruby available as required.

This article The Closet JRubyists is exactly what I hoped to hear about JRuby, and I might even point to the future of Ruby and Rails. Consider what Sun now has to offer Rubyists, all for free :

1. Solaris OS, with its builtin virtualisation
2. GlassFish, their JVM
3. MySQL, now their database
4. JRuby, with its access to the universe of Java class libraries, performance now faster, more memory and database connection efficient than MRI
5. NetBeans - highly underrated IDE with possibly the best Ruby support.

What more could we ask for ? Of course there are many other alternatives outside to most of these items, but its interesting to note this full stack offering from a company like Sun for the Ruby community, and when the whole stack comes from one vendor, they are more likely to take responsibility for integration issues.