Congratulations to David, and, of course, the rest of the rails-core gang for getting Rails 1.0 out the door. Much promised, long awaited. I’ve been runing 0.13.8 consistently, and decided not to upgrade to the Release Candidates, instead holding out for 1.0.

Well, my Powerbook reinstall went smoothly last weekend, and all that’s left is to install Rails. I was going to follow Dan Benjamin’s excellent instructions, but decided to leave it a few more days for 1.0. That day came early! Unfortunately, life is chocka right now, so there just isn’t time to install it til the weekend. That’s when I gave Locomotive another shot; a self-contained install of Rails, lighttpd with FastCGI, and sqllite. Very impressive, too; just pointed it at a development app, added it to the list, clicked “run” – and there we were in the browser, running on Rails. For the next few days, it’ll let me vent my PHP frustration with minimum hassle. Come the weekend, I’ll install 1.0 proper. Can’t wait to get back on the railsroad…

Symphony, the slightly-awaited publishing/blogging app from 21degrees (who don’t have a website – it now redirects to Symphony) that’s been under wraps for yonks, finally launches. According to the marketing gumph, it gives you the “power and flexibility to make your dream website a reality“.

Maybe – but I’m not sure it’s going to when it’s using XSLT, of all things, as its templating language! It’s not too complex, but it is a fussy, very un-plain-english way of defining templates. It’s a similar problem to the one I have with WordPress, which just uses PHP functions rather than any abstract templating language. Neither are particularly difficult, but they are fussy, and they’re not like HTML – which is something many people may know.

In fact, looking at it again, their use of XSLT to make a “for-each” loop is just horrid. So in short: nice idea, but I can think of an awful lot of people who’d be put off by XSLT, no matter how compliant it is.