Ruby on smartphones and PDAs
The announcement by several device vendors that Ruby on Rails can now be run on mobile devices means that the industry can at last standardize around a platform that’s simple and …uh…simple…and uh, well, it’s simple. Which is good, because most mobile devices, not to mention the developers who work on them have a rather, uh…simple…uh…simple outlook on life.
After this announcement, Nokia unveiled the first Ruby on Rails smartphone, where end users (and not just developers) can look at the underlying source code to admire and gossip about the elegance and uh, simplicity of the script. There’s even an easter egg in the thing, where when you press #* three times in rapid succession, an image of some guy named Matz giggling comes up. You can’t run 99.99999% of the available mobile apps out there on the new smartphone, but Nokia estimates that this is not a problem, because the developers are happy that they have to write less lines of code and that’s all that matters. Everything revolves around the developers you know. Really.
A Sun press release announced that the company will be ditching Java ME because all that configuration and profiles stuff is too confusing and is for losers who like complexity. From now on, every single mobile device will be required to run Ruby, whether they want to or not. And the evil eye to those who won’t convert. Bwahahaha.