I had started to learn about programming patterns, and how useful they could be, but as expected, other things started coming up and prevented me from finishing the book I was reading.
Well I was tasked by my manager to take a look at Ruby on Rails. I've been playing with it here and there for a little while when I had breaks. I finally had a little bit of spare time, so I tried InstantRails which lets you get up and running very quickly (not instantly, but pretty close).
A few observations about Ruby so far.
The first thing I noticed was that when you created a project all the folder structure was created for you automatically. While this may reduce the flexibility of your own folder structure, it allows Ruby to run without any configuration files, things are just where they are expected to be.
It implements the Controller/View/Model design for development. At a very high level your UI is in the View portion, business logic is in the controller, and data access and logic is in the Model. This pretty much mirrors the design pattern for Cocoa on the Apple, which I found intriguing. (I had tried this on a VM of Windows Server 2003).
Playing with some of the demo code, I like how simple everything seems to be so far, but of course the real challenge will be to take an existing application and duplicating it in Ruby and see what I end up with.