Rails for Fashionistas

Today somebody asked me if I would use Rails without plugins or gem extensions. Can you believe it? I looked her up and down and gave her the triple snap. Then I asked her If I looked like the kind of programmer that would let my apps go prancing around the inter-tubes naked? Like, even on a bad day I'm going to dress up my application in a few sexy little plugins, not to mention some tastefully chosen gems. At this point she asked me for advice on which plugins and gems to use. Here was my advice:

Wanna wear something classic? Will_paginate is like the little black dress of plugins. It looks good year after year. Want something a bit more risky? Haml and Sass are hot right now, but they'll both probably go the way of the swatch watch. What's out of date? restful_authentication is like soooo rails 1.x. Another thing is that the big fashion houses are always worth watching. 37 Signals? they are like Versace, Gucci and Prada all rolled into one. DHH, OMG, you brought sexy back. Thoughtbot? Yea, they're another one you can count on for high-end ready-to-wear accessories. Like, when I think about factory_girl's Factory.stub method I go out and by my infant son a new fur coat.

So, like, you can tell our conversation was going well, but can you believe it? Some neanderthal wearing a pager interrupted us. He started talking about Struts and some kind of config file generator plugin for eclipse he was working on. Before we could stop him he emailed us the url of his CVS repository. Then he got paged and had to leave. We both looked at each other and laughed until we cried. I mean, please! Don't talk to me about your Java frameworks. I don't shop at Wal-Mart and I sure as hell won't use J-terd. Hey Ricky Martin, 1995 called and they want their animated gifs back!

That's right sweetheart, Rails is all about the bling! Sure, sometimes late at night while github is down and the home shopping network is the only thing on TV I find myself thinking about something Zed Shaw said. Then I pour out some liquor for _why the lucky stiff. I hit rock bottom and imitate Marilyn Monroe making drunk kissy faces to JFK. Camellllotttt! Where have you gone!?! But then @wycats tweets about the Rails 3 beta and I'm like, "Screw it! Rubys are a programmer's best friend!"