The Art of Rails®

Chapter 8. Playing with Blocks

W. Web listened intently as his companions bantered back and forth as if according to a script. They had been sitting at the table for some 40 minutes, most of them spent discussing the day's protest and how it had gone. This group, it turned out, was exactly who Web was sent to find — prominent representatives from the clans allied with his, sent to show support and presence at the URL protest downtown.

Wall-mounted oil lamps flickered oranges and yellows off the shadows in the basement tavern as discussion of the protest moved to one of motivation, as such conversations tend to do. The occasional shouts and nasal laughter of a group of lingering URLs, their scrawny, fry-like bodies in baggy homemade t-shirts, could be heard amid the clinking of glasses from the bar across the hall.

"Flexibility," Schema said, slapping his hand definitively down on the table and looking at Web. "What we need is some flexibility. You have no idea what it's like having to do the same thing all day."

"But what else is there to do?" Rusty responded. "You create data; you update it. If you're lucky, someone might come and read it, too. And then one day, you send it to the big bit bucket in the sky."

"That's exactly the kind of myopic response that gets us into this type of problem. Look at us! You, six feet tall. Me, with a mustache! People grow, things change. We don't always know what we want to do with a thing at the time we build it."

"But there's a balance to be kept. ...