From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2002-09-02T00:08:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby jobs


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On Sun, 2002-09-01 at 08:18, Phlip wrote:
> Is anyone, like, making money writing Ruby programs yet? Not the books or=
=20
> speeches; the actual "Value Added" thing.

an interesting question.

i have been attempting to create a ruby accounting application for a
specific market from which i could make a quite a bit of money. while
the primary logic was easy enough to create and is mostly complete (and
ruby made it fun!), putting a front-end gui on it has proven laborous
and imperfect. worse, creating good printable reports has proven to be
all but impossible outside of writing my own a report engine from
scratch, something i do not have the time to do (that's a whole project
in itself!).

i am thus sorry to say that it looks as if i will be giving up the use
of ruby for this application :-(  i am glad i discovered ruby and have
become fairly capable with it. i certainly will use ruby in the future=20
for any project that it is applicable too, but that doesn't look to be
in the class of profitable projects.

this is perhaps a good indication of where ruby developers might wish to
focus their energies. freeride promises to be helpful in this regard
when it eventually has an integrated gui forms designer. as for report
engines, it is unfortunate that datavision switched to java (primarily
for the lack of a good GUI). in fact a reporting tool as such is
something sorely missing in linux development altogether.

perhaps one day ruby will have a complete rad enviornment competive with
the likes of visual studio and kylix, but until then i do not see it
being exceptionally profitable. the best bet for doing so currently is
likley in the development of web applications.

--=20
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net

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